Vivian Gornic, Fierce Attachments: 'Me, myself and my mother' - book review

'A masterclass in memoir writing, and the mother/daughter relationship it portrays is staggeringly complex'

A complicated relationship with one’s parent(s) is ripe fodder for any self-respecting literary memoir these days, but the American writer Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments – published in America in 1987 – stands as the grand matriarch of the genre. It’s a masterclass in memoir writing, and the mother/daughter relationship it portrays is staggeringly complex.

Walking the streets of Manhattan together, Gornick’s mother will stop strangers in their tracks and say: “This is my daughter. She hates me.”

The good times are “a kind of softening between us”, Gornick writes, but during the bad times they are both left “burning” with rage. Ultimately, they’re inextricably “locked into a narrow channel of acquaintance, intense and binding”. But there’s nothing narrow about Gornick’s book. What could become an exercise in tunnel vision or litany of grievances is an expansive meditation on female experience, and by extension, something of a collective memoir.

Growing up in a tenement in the Bronx, “all I remember is a building full of women”. She explains the impact these other women had on her life: “I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face,” only realising now, 30 years on, “how much of them I understood”.

“Tenement intimacy” leads to a particular kind of female solidarity and shared experience, complete with intense rivalries. As an adolescent Gornick finds herself ensnared in a powerful struggle for her own identity, caught between her mother, a woman who both represents the maternal and the dedicated, loyal wife, even long after her husband’s demise, and their beautiful neighbour Nettie, a widow who’s completely unprepared for the trials of motherhood foisted upon her, and who comes to stand for sex to the young writer.

In many ways Gornick did escape her mother’s “suffocating suffering femaleness”. She became a reporter for The Village Voice covering the feminist movement in the 1970s, and her 1997 collection of essays The End of the Novel of Love argued that the traditional marriage plot lost its dramatic potential after the social changes of the 60s and 70s; another stunning memoir published this year (The Odd Woman and the City, whose title references George Gissing’s novel), is that of a woman not defined by her romantic entanglements.

Yet there they are at the end of Fierce Attachments, a 48-year-old and her 80-year-old mother, bound together by something far stronger than their anger or conflict: “Suddenly her life presses on my heart.”

Fierce Attachments, by Vivian Gornick (Daunt Books, £9.99) Order at £9.49 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop