Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

I began leaving home at nineteen and kept leaving until I was married in the living room at twenty-four in a noisy act of faith that announced the matter accomplished.

One night at a party a painter twice my age said tiredly to me, “It’s all in the measurements. Just measure accurately and I guarantee it will come out fine.” He was right. I learned to measure, and the coffee misery ended as suddenly as it had begun: as though I had driven through a patch of fog on a night when visibility is already low.

I sat at the desk and I struggled to think. That’s how I liked to put it. For years I said, “I’m struggling to think.” Just as my mother said she was struggling to live. Mama thought she deserved a medal for swinging her legs over the side of the bed in the morning, and I guess I did, too, just for sitting at the desk.

Once every few weeks the air cleared for half a second, and quick! I’d get down two paragraphs of readable prose.

A woman said, “What you could do if you didn’t have to meet journalistic deadlines. A shame there’s no government subsidy.” I started to speak. Misery dissolved in my mouth, glued my lips shut. What would I say if I could speak? And to whom would I say it? I “struggled” on.

We thought because we were always talking we were connecting.

“I am the repository of your life now, Ma.” “Yes, you are, you are. Let’s see now. Where were we?”

We are each less interested in justice than we used to be. The antagonism between us is no longer relentless. We have survived our common life, if not together at least in each other’s presence, and there is a peculiar comradeship between us now.

But still! Don’t I get any credit for spotting a good idea, Ma? That one should try to live one’s life? Doesn’t that count, Ma? That counts for nothing, Ma?”