Attachments Summary
Judith Rossner

Attachments Summary

Loneliness is again a major theme in Attachments, as it was in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1975; see separate entry). Nadine's life is governed by trying to avoid loneliness, which is represented for her by the image of falling. In the early pages she admits that "during the first twenty-five or thirty years of my life I was too agitated to learn much. Too busy trying to keep myself from falling." The death of her parents in a freak swimming accident is a blow from which she never fully recovers. Periodically she wishes to be a little girl again, watching her parents swimming together, although that memory evokes also the loneliness of returning to a bed no longer cozy but now "a cold and lonely place."

The belief throughout Attachments is that each person has room for only one attachment at a time. The Siamese twins, Amos and Eddie...

(read more from the Short Guide)