An ordinary, inhabited life

I read the middle fifty pages of this book last night while working at the bar. I was sitting on a bar stool trying to read amidst rock bands and loud, increasingly more intoxicated people surrounding me.

One guy came up to me and asked what I was reading. Once he found out, he kept coming up to me saying:

“Omigod, you’re not going to believe what happens in this story. I really want to tell you but I’m going to ruin it for you if I do. It’s a crazy surprise ending. If I tell you you’ll kick me out, won’t you?”

I didn’t want him to tell me what was going to happen, but I hoped he was right-that there was some dramatic turn the book would take. The way Gornick writes, I kept waiting for something to come around the corner. As I kept reading, and finished the book, I learned there was no crazy surprise ending. That the power of this story is that it’s an ordinary one. An ordinary story told well.

Gornick’s relationship with her mother is central to the book. We don’t see Gornick without her mother. By her teenage years she noticed:

“My skin crawled with her. She was everywhere, all over me, inside and out. Her influence clung, membrane-like, to my nostrils, my eyelids, my open mouth”(79).

Gornick fills the text with patterns. She spends time describing actual patterns of fabric: “thin shawl of tropical print”(56), “paisley covered bed”(101).

She spends time asking questions to her younger self, to her audience. Most of page 92, Gornick asks herself and us question about question about Nettie: “When did it begin? When did she start roaming the streets? Or sitting in the boat park?.....When did I begin to take it in?”

By making these questions explicit instead of answering them implicitly in the text, Gornick shows us she is writing a memoir, she shares her process with us.

The author uses parentheses to insert the present day Gornick into the story. These insertions holler, “I know what was going on back there” and “I’m my own person now, these comments are not influenced by my mother”

By using blank space on the page, Gornick gives traumatic events the pause they deserve: “He knew that his mother’s life was not an exercise of power but an exchange of humiliation. Now he was just trying out what he knew”(101).

She also uses blank space to traverse time. On page 120, there are two blank spaces. The first signifies “months”, the second, many years.

Fierce Attachments is full of profound realizations by the author. I am most struck by the one she has once she begins studying at City College:

“While we pursued ideas we felt known, to ourselves and to one another. The world made sense, there was ground beneath our feet, a place in the universe to stand”(106). As an immigrant student, the academy simultaneously provides stability and location and threatens the footing she has with her family of origin.

As the story comes to a close, Gornick’s mother tells her to “walk away from her life”(203). Gornick thinks: “I see the light, I hear the street. I’m half in, half out”(203).

She is half in her mother’s life and half out and has been for a long time. That she has written this story shows as much as it might not seem, she has fully inhabited her own ordinary life since the beginning.