Indeed, the book and the writing is so lively and entertaining that it’s easy to overlook its sadness. We are locked into a narrow channel of acquaintance, intense and binding.” Too bad for her: but it does present the reader with plenty of zing. Their relationship, she says, is “not good. It cannot make him want to ask her to sit down with his friends on a lovely Saturday afternoon in early spring.’Īt the time of writing the book, Gornick is 47 and her mother 80. ‘It’s uncivilised he shouldn’t remember!’ ‘Ma, how that son managed to survive having Bella for a mother, much less made it through medical school, is something for Ripley, and you know it.’ Take this exchange where Gornick’s mother is talking about her friend Bella, whose son never invites her to his home: In its zippy to-and-fros between mother and daughter, it meets expectations for a certain kind of American writing.
Like Adam Mars-Jones’s Kid Gloves, it’s ultimately as much about the author as the parent, but Gornick’s style is blunter, jazzier. Here we have the first UK edition of a book published in the US in 1987.įierce Attachments is a bright blaze of a book. “The P&L” for the publishing business, says James Daunt frankly, “is shocking”, but perhaps that’s the secret of its success: supported by the Daunt bookshops, the books don’t need to be commercial hits, so the editors can follow their tastes. This one is from Daunt Books, which in five years has established itself as one of the most reliable and interesting publishers in the UK, particularly for its reissues. From one child’s memoir of a parent to another.
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