Sunday night, I finished Vivian Gornick’s memoir Fierce Attachments. Reputation warranted. Haven’t been hypnotized like that since the opening credits of The White Lotus.
Fear not, there will be no book review, but for our purposes, I will borrow the book’s central question: Can a daughter (Gornick) escape the resentful shadow of her mother’s unlived life?
In September of 2022, on my wife and I’s wedding day, I was a practicing clinician, planning to keep practicing until I reached the nebulous goal of being in a “better spot” to quit. One month later, I resigned and wouldn’t practice again.
What changed?
Days after the wedding, I returned to work, doing the work I’d long known wasn’t the work I was supposed to be doing. Resentment, I thought, could be controlled until I reached the “better spot”. I was soon humbled. When Keti arrived home from work, it shouldered into our embrace. When we brainstormed where to hang our paintings, it stunted our creativity. When we ate dinner together, sketching dreams onto the violet sky above the Santa Ynez, it tinted our vision.
I thought about our lives together, about our relationship with our children, about our everything. The writing was on our empty walls: if I didn’t kill this resentment, it would kill everything I cared about.
In the final pages of Fierce Attachments, in a last-gasp conversation with her aging mother, Gornick pleads, “Don’t I get credit for a good idea, Ma? That one should try to live one’s life?”
I won’t tell you what the mother says, but I will tell you what kills the resentment: trying.
To livin’ a life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD
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