Fierce Attachments Audiobook By Vivian Gornick cover art

Fierce Attachments

A Memoir

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Fierce Attachments

By: Vivian Gornick
Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
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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.

©1987 Vivian Gornick (P)2022 Tantor Art & Literature Authors Parenting & Families Parents & Adult Children Women Memoir Health Mental Health
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I don’t really like to listen to audiobooks that have a storyline, but the authors voice and story were so captivating and easy to listen to, I couldn’t stop. Great audiobook, now I want to read other Vivian books

Story is Captivating

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I loved that she read her story herself. It is the intricacies of the words that makes the story familiar and tinged with life and emotion.

Fabulous!!!

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I first read this book and enjoyed hearing Vivian Gornick narrate it herself. I find the beginning part of the book particularly energizing. The author was born in 1935, and her intense relationship with her mother and the women in her apartment building is beautifully depicted with reconstructed dialogue.

Blunt, vivid, and engaging!

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I absolutely adored this book. It had me in thrall, it read hotter than any fiction I’ve read since Milkman, and it taught me more about writing and thinking than I’ve learned in years. I’ll read it again.

Her voice

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A bitter woman complaining about everything. If that speak to you, this is the book for you.

Bitter Whining

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