Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

Say what you will, children don’t love their parents as they did when I was young.” “Ma, do you really believe that?” “I certainly do! My mother died in my sister’s arms, with all her children around her. How will I die, will you please tell me? They probably won’t find me for a week. Days pass. I don’t hear from you. Your brother I see three times a year. The neighbors? Who? Who’s there to check on me? Manhattan is not the Bronx, you know.” “Exactly. That’s what this is all about. Manhattan is not the Bronx. Your mother didn’t die in her daughter’s arms because your sister loved her more than we love you. Your sister hated your mother, and you know it. She was there because it was her duty to be there, and because she lived around the corner all her married life. It had nothing to do with love. It wasn’t a better life, it was an immigrant life, a working-class life, a life from another century.” “Call it what you want,” she replies angrily, “it was a more human way to live.”