Thoughts on Vivian Gornick & Fierce Attachments:

In a class last semester I was asked what I thought it meant to be a "writer's writer." At first thought I imagined it was a writer that other writer's admired, which could be true. But after some more thought I realized it can mean a lot of things, like a writer who makes certain style or craft choices that other writers enjoy. Or a writer who uses form to further her material. Or a writer who uses vivid imagery. The term can mean anything from a vague phase or a thoughtful observation. Whatever lies behind the term "writer's writer," it surprised me in its presence in the introduction of Fierce Attachments. As a first-time reader of Gornick I did not know what to expect. Jonathan Lethem writes, "I hate to saddle her with the epithet "writer's writer," but Fierce Attachments demands honor as the work of a breathtaking technician, one whose control of a distilled form of scene and dialogue, of withheld punch lines, and of the use of the white spaces on the page...[the book] draws strength from the method of paradox" (vii). I realize after reading this book that Gornick is a "writer's writer" because, even if the phrase is cheezy, other writers can learn from her. She achieves in her memoir what are other writer's mere goals.

From The Situation and the Story in which Gornick writes about finding her voice in memoir she says: “I have created a persona who can find the story riding the tide that I, in my unmediated state, am otherwise going to drown in.” In Fierce Attachments that voice is able to “ride the tide” through childhood to tell the truth, as Gornick proves to be very important to her. She continues: “I began to read the greats in essay-writing—and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae.” She co-mingles that truthful persona into voice, the adult voice who walks through New York City with her mother reflecting on the past and the voice of the child who "began sitting on the fire escape in the spring, and [who] sat there every night throughout that immeasurably long first summer, with [her] mother lying on the couch behind [her] moaning, crying, sometimes screaming late into the night, and [her] brother wandering aimlessly about, reading" (55). In between these two voices she is left with the contemplation of the artist-self who cannot allow the “rectangle” to open for long enough. This rectangular shape is herself and is represented by the book she writes. “That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall...When the space is wide I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing” (103).

In an article Faith Adiele wrote for Yes! Magazine she says that memoir is the "intersection between story and reflection." When I first read this statement I did not fully understand the length that these two intersections can make together. Reading Gornick and watching how she weaves the story of her relationship as a child with her mother and the reflection of their relationship as an adult I finally understand what Faith means. In doing so Gornick sets the time and location of each scene immediately to make the two stories clear. This is one of the techniques she used that I admire most. In the beginning of one section she starts: “I am fourteen years old. It’s an evening in late spring. I push open the door of Nettie’s apartment” (91). In another: “The years are coming up thickly...forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight...There is no past now, only the ongoing present...seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty. Eighty. My God, my mother is eighty” (191). No matter what the scene, time or season we are always given a relative statement to orient ourselves in the text which is so important in a book that covers so much ground. “A year after my mother told Mrs. Drucker she was a whore the Druckers moved out of the building and Nettie Levine moved into their vacated apartment” (33). “One night when Stefan and I had been married a little more than a year the phone rang at midnight” (147). She tells us where we are in the narrative even if we don't know yet ourselves.

The honesty Gornick employs in the book is honorary. I am inspired by the brave, as she puts it, "persona" she takes on: "We're walking up Fifth Avenue. It's a bad day for me. I'm feeling fat and lonely, trapped in my lousy life. I know I should be home working, and that I'm here playing the dutiful daughter only to avoid the desk. The anxiety is so great I'm walking with a stomachache. My mother, as always, knows she can do nothing for me, but my unhappiness makes her nervous. She is talking, talking at tedious, obfuscating length, about a cousin of mine who is considering divorce" (31). I really feel like I get to hear the interior of this person's mind. I don't feel that she spares me any details to make herself look "good" to compromise her story. In another section she proves that honesty is so important to her she mocks herself: "That's ridiculous. Sometimes I think I was born saying, 'That's ridiculous.' It shoots out of me as easily as good-morning-good-evening-have-a-nice-day-take-care. It is my most on-automatic response. The variety of observation that allows 'That's ridiculous' to pass from my brain to my tongue is astonishing" (80). In another section Gornick shows another side to her multi-faceted honesty and psyche. The information she divulges is sorrowful but the way she deals with the topic of depression is refreshing: "The imaginable had always been problematic. When I was a child the feeling of things went into me: deep, narrow, intense...I took it all so literally. I was without imagination...I could imagine no other than that which stood before me...I could feel strongly but I could not imagine...It would be years before I learned that extraordinary focus, that excluding insistence, is also called depression" (127-128).