Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
Vivian Gornick
Mar 2022 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Vivian Gornick
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6 hr 16 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the principal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants," Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick's struggle to find herself in love and in work. As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the listener's admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter's mother.
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About the author
Vivian Gornick is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations and been collected in The Best American Essays 2014. Gornick became a legendary writer for Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s.
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