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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, makes me still wonder
The paradox is double: by the evidence of the book in your hands, the very book that describes this resistance and frustration, Gornick’s rectangle has done precisely that, grown to encompass not only her life but, for the duration of the book, her reader’s. And yet for all it encompasses, it remains exactly as intimate and local as her first description of its appearance: exactly the size of her body.
my frightened greedy freedom-loving life wells up in me and spills down my soft-skinned face, the one she has given me.
“You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.”
At City College I sat talking in a basement cafeteria until ten or eleven at night with a half dozen others who also never wanted to go home to Brooklyn or the Bronx, and here in the cafeteria my education took root. Here I learned that Faulkner was America, Dickens was politics, Marx was sex, Jane Austen the idea of culture, that I came from a ghetto and D. H. Lawrence was a visionary.
Not that we were intellectually distinguished, we weren’t; but our hungry energy vitalized the place. The idea of intellectual life burned in us. 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. City College made conscious in me inner cohesion as a first value.
Mama wanted to suffer, I wanted to read. None of us knew how to discipline herself to the successful pursuit of an ideal, normal woman’s life. And indeed, none of us ever achieved it. Yet the idea of such a life never loosened its hold, and day by day, month by year, it drove each of us deeper into conflict.
