Know And Understand About Attachment Theory: City Of One

City Of One
Name
Institution
City of One
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines a memoir as “a written account in which someone (such as a famous performer or politician) describes past experiences.” In another definition from the dictionary, a memoir is “a narrative composed from personal experience.” People are often in the habit of confusing memoirs and autobiographies. However, these two are different. First of all, an autobiography covers an author’s entire life and includes the author’s public and private life. Conversely, a memoir primarily involves a certain portion of the author’s life and particularly provide details of how it relates to an object, a person, or a historical event. City of One is Francine Cournos’s memoir which was published in 1999. In it, she provides details of her childhood days as well as how the death of her parents especially her mother affected her. She is incredibly detailed in her revelations and therefore, manages to take the reader on a journey about her life and the struggles that ensued mainly because she lacked parental love as well as guidance. Her work is indeed to be admired and has been touted to be a yardstick of the quality of memoirs.
Cournos was born in the 1940s and lived with her family in the South Bronx. When she was three years old, her father died, and even though she was young, the effects of his death later came to take effect. Her mother was the only person who knew what had happened, but instead of explaining things to them, she notes that her mother stopped talking about him. Cournos and her siblings did not know how to take whatever was going on, but the presence of her mother helped them overcome the loss. Immediately after that, her mother’s parents came to live with them to help with the financial situation. However, as fate would have it, her grandfather died two years later, and this dealt them a huge blow financially and emotionally. Her childhood, it would appear, was filled with unexplained disappearances of people who were close to her and her family. While she could have been oblivious to her father’s death, it was apparent that she started noticing the changes in her home as well as the deteriorating health of her mother.
The world seemed to move fast around her, and as she provides details of the relationship she had with her mother, it becomes evident to the reader that the journey to understand death was taking a toll on her. Her mother, it turns out, was always working even after her illness worsened. Cournos provides details of how she gave herself injections and sometimes could be hard breathing hard (Cournos, 1999). The death of her mother confused her greatly, and like any other child her age (she was 11 years old when her mother died), she expected an explanation of some sort. However, her mother’s siblings were not ready to disclose anything to Cournos and her siblings. In her memoir, she mentioned their “inability to find words” to explain what had happened to her mother. She continues to say that “our mother had ceased to exist, but this apparently required no explanation. We did not say goodbye to her at the funeral. We were not invited.” Jacqueline Boone (1999) writes and says that Cournos tried to device her private theories to explain how life was unraveling around her. Finding her explanations and theories was all that was left mainly because of the absence of “any sense of empathy and responsibility” showcased by her family.
Her family’s negligence confused her and made it even harder for her to live past her mother’s death. In her quest to find and formulate her theories, she came to a conclusion that “bad children lose parents.” To her, she was partly to blame for what had happened to her parents. In her narration, she felt banished because it was evident that she deserved to be punished. Cournos’ becomes increasingly intimate with her audience as she explains how her life was taking different turns and experiencing different as well as mutated challenges. According to Geller (1999), Cournos draws her readers in by taking them through “her life struggles, revelations, hiding places, discoveries, zeniths of counterdependence and nadirs of depression, struggles of intimacy, and quests for acceptance.” These help to make the memoir lively and makes it seem as if she is talking to herself while the audience is paying close attention.
It would also be irresponsible to fail to mention how the details of the attachment theory influence her life. The man largely responsible for the attachment theory was known as John Bowlby. According to McCleod (2009), Bowlby with his colleague James Robertson both “observed that children experienced intense d...