Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

by Vivian Gornick

When we stand as we do now, before a store window, forced to realise there are women who dress with deliberation, we are aware of mutual disability, and we become what we often are: two women of remarkably similar inhibitions bonded together by virtue of having lived within each other’s orbit nearly all their lives.

I saw that I was suspended inside my own life. Only a small part of it contained substance, I was daydreaming the rest.