It's wonderful and strange when an author describes a life whose concrete particulars are totally unlike your own—and yet pulls out emotional tenors and patterns that direct both writer's and reader's communal experiences. ( )

Este libro es en realidad un libro de memorias, con lo que eso supone de malo para la ficción. Pero consigue superar esa propiedad, gracias a dios. Este libro no habla sobre tres mujeres sino sobre la combinación de tres mujeres tomadas de mil en mil fases de sus vidas, algunas de las cuales nos representan en muchos momentos de las nuestras. Y vamos pasando de una de las protagonistas a otra, según nuestros momentos vitales, o nuestros recuerdos, o nuestras ideas. Este libro es, como dice Jonathan Lethen en el prólogo, atemporal y clásico.
Vivian es, a veces, cruel con su madre, con su vecina, con la mujer de su amante, pero también con ella misma, y, en el caso de aquellas que están más cerca de ella, deja intacto siempre el amor que las une. Un amor raro, difícil, pero como todos.
Pero lo mejor de este libro es el manejo de la técnica. Este libro es literatura viva. Lo raro es que la autora no haya escrito nunca ficción.
En fin, que este libro, al contrario que un amor que Gormick describe en él, sí que podría redactar leyes y cartografiar territorio. ( )

Gornick and her mother are so alike and so different, as portrayed in her memoir. It's an honest reflection on their relationship and that with their friend Nettie. Both women were enormous influences in Gornick's life. It's also a reflection on the lives of women only one generation apart. ( )

This aptly-titled memoir for three (one, her father, exits without leaving much of an impression other than vacancy) details the constricted life of writer Gornick and her mother, widowed early, within the confines of their Bronx apartment and neighborhood. Gornick battles her acerbic mother throughout her life and seeks out useful allies. Nettie, another widow and neighbor, a woman who conducts affairs openly in their universe of disapproving housewives ("Drucker, Roseman, Zimmerman, Singer, Kornfeld" - all others faceless, featureless, and identified via husband's name alone) becomes Gornick's purveyor of sensual possibilities. On the death of her father, Gornick's mother hermetically seals herself into histrionics of ceaseless mourning and Gornick is unable to wrench herself from her mother's sphere. Interspersed in the story are their walks through Manhattan years later, as they become more companionable yet still combative, in early middle and old age. This is an intense narrative, frustrating as Gornick seems unable to establish her own territory, although we know from her writings in the Village Voice and her body of non-fiction work that she very much does so, just not here. Her words flow as speech would, her rage and her contrasting descriptions of pleasures of the body as vivid as if you were at a long but wholly engaging dinner together.

Quotes: "Suddenly, I am miserable. Acutely miserable. A surge of defeat passes through me, I feel desolated, without direction or focus, all my daily struggles small and disoriented. I become speechless. Not merely silent, but speechless, My mother sees that my spirits have plunged. She says nothing. We walk on, neither of us speaking." ( )

Memorias de la escritora y activista Vivian Gornikck. ( )