{"title":"Vivian Gornick","description":"Vivian Gornick's books include Approaching Eye Level, The End of The Novel of Love, and The Situation and The Story. She lives in New York City.","products":[{"product_id":"fierce-attachments-a-memoir-paperback","title":"Fierce Attachments: A Memoir - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eVivian Gornick's \u003ci\u003eFierce Attachments\u003c\/i\u003e--hailed by the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e for the renowned feminist author's \"mesmerizing, thrilling\" truths within its pages--has been selected by the publication's book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called \"the principal crux of female despair\" the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBorn and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of \"urban peasants,\" Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick's struggle to find herself in love and in work. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAs Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader's admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter's mother. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eUnsparing, deeply courageous, \u003ci\u003eFierce Attachments\u003c\/i\u003e is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"[Gornick] stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others--at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters...[\u003ci\u003eFierce Attachments\u003c\/i\u003e is] a portrait of the artist as she finds a language--original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities--worthy of the women that raised her.\"--\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51270828851423,"sku":"9780374529963","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/pq6OTjLxtp9780374529963.webp?v=1787784951"},{"product_id":"the-odd-woman-and-the-city-a-memoir-paperback","title":"The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Autobiography\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eA contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eFierce Attachments\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eA memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, \u003ci\u003eThe Odd Woman and the City\u003c\/i\u003e explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has \"shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy\" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees.\u003cbr\u003e Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the \u003ci\u003eflaneur \u003c\/i\u003ein urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, \u003ci\u003eThe Odd Woman and the City \u003c\/i\u003ebeautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed \u003ci\u003eFierce Attachments\u003c\/i\u003e, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51270828949727,"sku":"9780374536152","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/BwkFHY5zQA9780374536152.webp?v=1787784952"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/vivian-gornick.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}