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Attachments
From the New York Times bestselling author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar comes the story of two women whose relationships to conjoined twins puts their friendship to the ultimate test.
A haunting story of an obsessive relationship; physical, spiritual, and sexual bonding; jealousy and eroticism; tenderness and exploitation; a woman who draws her closest friend into a bizarre union; the two men who marry them—want and need them—despite their own inevitable attachment; and wildly sensuous fantasies that suddenly come true.
A haunting story of an obsessive relationship; physical, spiritual, and sexual bonding; jealousy and eroticism; tenderness and exploitation; a woman who draws her closest friend into a bizarre union; the two men who marry them—want and need them—despite their own inevitable attachment; and wildly sensuous fantasies that suddenly come true.
Hardcover
First published December 31, 1977
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77 people want to read
About the author
Judith Rossner
24 books70 followersJudith Perelman Rossner was an American novelist, best known for her 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which was inspired by the murder of Roseann Quinn and examined the underside of the seventies sexual liberation movement. Though Looking for Mr. Goodbar remained Rossner's best known and best selling work, she continued to write. Her most successful post-Goodbar novel was 1983's August, about the relationship between a troubled young woman and her psychoanalyst who has emotional troubles of her own.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 7, 2009
Siamese twins! And Siamese twin sex! Yay!
May 9, 2019
Round up to 3.5. I can't say I loved it, but I liked it enough to read to the end.
March 30, 2025
What kind of a woman would marry a conjoined twin? Nadine, the main character of Judith Rossner’s Attachments would and she’ll one up your expectations too by convincing her best friend Dianne to marry the other conjoined twin. The refrain of “it’s complicated” when asked about a person’s love life is taken to a whole other level here. The author’s intentions are complicated too, so much so that it is not entirely clear what she strives to accomplish in writing this story.
Nadine is a naive young woman whose parents are connected to each other through the institution of marriage and yet they are emotionally distant and spend little time together. They live in a big house in California by standards that would be considered luxurious by today’s standards though the family is described as middle class in the context of this novel from the early 1980s. Nadine travels to New York to attend college and be near her friend Dianne. From her experiences there, especially regarding sex, she learns that men don’t really care about women’s feelings. It is a massive over-generalization and her conclusion is largely her own fault due to her promiscuity and the types of men she chooses to be with. Never mind the fact that she doesn’t care about men’s feelings either. This attitude carries over into her relationship with the conjoined twins and results in her being unable to cope with her marriage, but that all comes later.
When she learns about a pair of conjoined twins, Amos and Eddie, who live nearby, Nadine stalks them and seduces them. She is out for a unique sexual experience and that is what she gets. When Dianne comes out to visit her in California, Nadine proposes, without too much thought, that the four of them get married. Nadine takes Amos and Dianne takes Eddie. They all agree and end up living on a remote plot of land in New Hampshire.
By this point we learn that Nadine is the central character of the novel. She is also self-centered and barely aware of the other people in this unusual family arrangement. She becomes the mother hen of the house, especially after Dianne has a daughter with Eddie who they name Carly. Dianne leaves her with Nadine to raise her as a surrogate mother since Dianne gets employed at an enviable job in a law firm. Here we get a contrast between the two sides of the modern woman: the family woman who dedicates her life to raising children and the career woman who leaves her child behind to climb the ladder of her profession. The twins, on the other hand, have almost no personalities. They work as auto mechanics and handymen, but barely ever speak and do little more than go swimming. It is hard to tell what Rossner’s intentions are here. Are the twins really as bland as the novel makes them out to be? Or maybe Nadine is just so self-absorbed that she cannot see them for who they really are. Or maybe they are just underdeveloped as literary characters. In any case, if the author’s intentions were more clearly defined it would make it easier to situate the twins in the narrative.
Nadine also gets pregnant twice by Amos and then she has three kids to raise, mostly on her own. Her son, daughter, and surrogate daughter are also underdeveloped as characters. Throughout most of the early phase of the marriage, the story is all about how the four of them manage their lives as two couple bound together via the conjoined twins. The turning point comes when a film maker shows up in town with a band of hippy assistants and they take interest in the family of four parents and three children. A documentary film about them is proposed and as they are filmed telling their stories on camera, something changes. Nadine, for the first time in the novel, begins to think about her life and evaluate her situation. It is the first time she shows any sense of self-awareness since previously she acted solely on impulse and intuition. Her life up until then was all about seizing the moment and avoiding any calculations about future consequences. Again, it is hard to tell what the author’s intentions are here. Nadine could be deliberately portrayed as being shallow and egocentric or it could be that Rossner just failed to develop her character to completion. It might even be a little of both. But when Nadine becomes more self-conscious, she doesn’t change much as a person so her development as a literary character has to be taken as a weakness in Rossner’s writing.
The film project is never completed. A major movie studio hears about it and buys it out to make a big budget movie based on the lives of Amos and Eddie. In addition, the contract that the twins sign stipulates that they undergo surgery to separate them so that the movie’s end will depend on the outcome of the operation. The surgery is successful, the family becomes rich, and a few things change. Amos and Eddie remain just as psychologically close as they have been all their lives, but they also feel the predictable sense of liberation you would expect them to feel.
One way that the families become liberated is in the ways that they detach from each other. Nadine and Amos take their children to live in a house across the street while Dianne and Eddie stay put with Carly who is traumatized by the break up since she sees less and less of Nadine. Amos also rediscovers his passion for Nadine, but being the kind of selfish woman she is, she becomes less enamored with him as his love grows. She has always treated him as an object before, and now that he is more realized as an individual human being, she loses interest in him in part because he is no longer a novelty to her.
Then a family crisis brings out the better side of Nadine. Twelve year old Carly begins smoking pot and runs away from home to tag along with a bunch of drifters and drop outs. Nadine leads the family on a search and rescue mission to find Carly and she emerges as a more sympathetic character for a few days while she spends sleepless nights trying to locate where Dianne and Eddie’s daughter has gone. The crisis brings the two families together, but the newfound unity crumbles as soon as Carly returns. They are faced with the same old situation as Nadine continues to despise Amos while his love for her stays constant. Dianne and Nadine eventually reveal the truth of their lives to each other too as both of them admit to being miserable. Nadine wishes she were a career woman and Dianne wishes she were a housewife.
Once again, it is difficult to tell what Judith Rossner intends to say with this novel. It clearly is an examination of the individual and what responsibilities they take on in the institution of marriage and family. But in the novel’s scope, responsibility does not lead to happiness. Rossner appears to be saying that there is no way to win. We are hopelessly doomed to disappointment and misery no matter what path we choose. The reader is left with a sense of petty nihilism.
Stronger characters would have helped this book a lot. Amos and Eddie are so under-developed that you almost have to feel sorry for them. The same is true for the children. In the non-fiction world, neglect is considered child abuse; in Rossner’s fictional world, the children are so under-developed as characters that you almost want to call the fictional police to have them removed by the Child Protective Services, saving them them from Nadine’s nest. Carly is a good case in point. Her motivations for running away from home are never explored or explained and the incident ends up being more of an ego trip for Nadine to show how hard she tries to care for the children under her domain. And that comes after she decides not to intervene when she knows the twelve year old girl is doing drugs.
Nadine is the most developed character in the entire book, but in contrast to the others she is too developed for her own good. The others are more like props and less like people. But compared to other literary characters, Nadine is half formed. Putting a 2.5 dimensional character into a milieu of 1.5 dimensional characters makes the novel’s elements clash in a haphazard way. In a novel that is character driven, it doesn’t really work. Finally, it should be said that a story with conjoined twins at the center should have the twins more developed as characters too. A novel based around such an oddity should be more odd in its execution. The conjoined twins are obviously used as a metaphor and a vehicle for exploring human relationships, but as a metaphor it doesn’t hold up due to the fact that living people aren’t metaphors. This might have worked better if they had been written with more personality and depth, or at least as much personality as Nadine and Dianne. But people without character in a character driven novel just don’t hold it all together well.
Judith Rossner has great raw materials to work with here. A story about two women who marry a pair of conjoined twins is unique enough to capture anyone’s attention, but your attention might be easily deflated due to the disproportionate elements of the writing. Nadine is over-drawn in some ways and under-drawn in others, and the others characters are under-drawn in totality. Otherwise the book is an existentialist melodrama with a gimmick thrown into the middle of it. But this novel does have unrealized potential and I’d say that Rossner is a better writer than what she creates here. My speculation is that some jerks at her publishing house gave her bad advice on how to make the book more commercially palatable and took it for the sake of sending the book to print. Attachments has enough going for it to make it worth reading once. Just don’t expect too much from it.
Nadine is a naive young woman whose parents are connected to each other through the institution of marriage and yet they are emotionally distant and spend little time together. They live in a big house in California by standards that would be considered luxurious by today’s standards though the family is described as middle class in the context of this novel from the early 1980s. Nadine travels to New York to attend college and be near her friend Dianne. From her experiences there, especially regarding sex, she learns that men don’t really care about women’s feelings. It is a massive over-generalization and her conclusion is largely her own fault due to her promiscuity and the types of men she chooses to be with. Never mind the fact that she doesn’t care about men’s feelings either. This attitude carries over into her relationship with the conjoined twins and results in her being unable to cope with her marriage, but that all comes later.
When she learns about a pair of conjoined twins, Amos and Eddie, who live nearby, Nadine stalks them and seduces them. She is out for a unique sexual experience and that is what she gets. When Dianne comes out to visit her in California, Nadine proposes, without too much thought, that the four of them get married. Nadine takes Amos and Dianne takes Eddie. They all agree and end up living on a remote plot of land in New Hampshire.
By this point we learn that Nadine is the central character of the novel. She is also self-centered and barely aware of the other people in this unusual family arrangement. She becomes the mother hen of the house, especially after Dianne has a daughter with Eddie who they name Carly. Dianne leaves her with Nadine to raise her as a surrogate mother since Dianne gets employed at an enviable job in a law firm. Here we get a contrast between the two sides of the modern woman: the family woman who dedicates her life to raising children and the career woman who leaves her child behind to climb the ladder of her profession. The twins, on the other hand, have almost no personalities. They work as auto mechanics and handymen, but barely ever speak and do little more than go swimming. It is hard to tell what Rossner’s intentions are here. Are the twins really as bland as the novel makes them out to be? Or maybe Nadine is just so self-absorbed that she cannot see them for who they really are. Or maybe they are just underdeveloped as literary characters. In any case, if the author’s intentions were more clearly defined it would make it easier to situate the twins in the narrative.
Nadine also gets pregnant twice by Amos and then she has three kids to raise, mostly on her own. Her son, daughter, and surrogate daughter are also underdeveloped as characters. Throughout most of the early phase of the marriage, the story is all about how the four of them manage their lives as two couple bound together via the conjoined twins. The turning point comes when a film maker shows up in town with a band of hippy assistants and they take interest in the family of four parents and three children. A documentary film about them is proposed and as they are filmed telling their stories on camera, something changes. Nadine, for the first time in the novel, begins to think about her life and evaluate her situation. It is the first time she shows any sense of self-awareness since previously she acted solely on impulse and intuition. Her life up until then was all about seizing the moment and avoiding any calculations about future consequences. Again, it is hard to tell what the author’s intentions are here. Nadine could be deliberately portrayed as being shallow and egocentric or it could be that Rossner just failed to develop her character to completion. It might even be a little of both. But when Nadine becomes more self-conscious, she doesn’t change much as a person so her development as a literary character has to be taken as a weakness in Rossner’s writing.
The film project is never completed. A major movie studio hears about it and buys it out to make a big budget movie based on the lives of Amos and Eddie. In addition, the contract that the twins sign stipulates that they undergo surgery to separate them so that the movie’s end will depend on the outcome of the operation. The surgery is successful, the family becomes rich, and a few things change. Amos and Eddie remain just as psychologically close as they have been all their lives, but they also feel the predictable sense of liberation you would expect them to feel.
One way that the families become liberated is in the ways that they detach from each other. Nadine and Amos take their children to live in a house across the street while Dianne and Eddie stay put with Carly who is traumatized by the break up since she sees less and less of Nadine. Amos also rediscovers his passion for Nadine, but being the kind of selfish woman she is, she becomes less enamored with him as his love grows. She has always treated him as an object before, and now that he is more realized as an individual human being, she loses interest in him in part because he is no longer a novelty to her.
Then a family crisis brings out the better side of Nadine. Twelve year old Carly begins smoking pot and runs away from home to tag along with a bunch of drifters and drop outs. Nadine leads the family on a search and rescue mission to find Carly and she emerges as a more sympathetic character for a few days while she spends sleepless nights trying to locate where Dianne and Eddie’s daughter has gone. The crisis brings the two families together, but the newfound unity crumbles as soon as Carly returns. They are faced with the same old situation as Nadine continues to despise Amos while his love for her stays constant. Dianne and Nadine eventually reveal the truth of their lives to each other too as both of them admit to being miserable. Nadine wishes she were a career woman and Dianne wishes she were a housewife.
Once again, it is difficult to tell what Judith Rossner intends to say with this novel. It clearly is an examination of the individual and what responsibilities they take on in the institution of marriage and family. But in the novel’s scope, responsibility does not lead to happiness. Rossner appears to be saying that there is no way to win. We are hopelessly doomed to disappointment and misery no matter what path we choose. The reader is left with a sense of petty nihilism.
Stronger characters would have helped this book a lot. Amos and Eddie are so under-developed that you almost have to feel sorry for them. The same is true for the children. In the non-fiction world, neglect is considered child abuse; in Rossner’s fictional world, the children are so under-developed as characters that you almost want to call the fictional police to have them removed by the Child Protective Services, saving them them from Nadine’s nest. Carly is a good case in point. Her motivations for running away from home are never explored or explained and the incident ends up being more of an ego trip for Nadine to show how hard she tries to care for the children under her domain. And that comes after she decides not to intervene when she knows the twelve year old girl is doing drugs.
Nadine is the most developed character in the entire book, but in contrast to the others she is too developed for her own good. The others are more like props and less like people. But compared to other literary characters, Nadine is half formed. Putting a 2.5 dimensional character into a milieu of 1.5 dimensional characters makes the novel’s elements clash in a haphazard way. In a novel that is character driven, it doesn’t really work. Finally, it should be said that a story with conjoined twins at the center should have the twins more developed as characters too. A novel based around such an oddity should be more odd in its execution. The conjoined twins are obviously used as a metaphor and a vehicle for exploring human relationships, but as a metaphor it doesn’t hold up due to the fact that living people aren’t metaphors. This might have worked better if they had been written with more personality and depth, or at least as much personality as Nadine and Dianne. But people without character in a character driven novel just don’t hold it all together well.
Judith Rossner has great raw materials to work with here. A story about two women who marry a pair of conjoined twins is unique enough to capture anyone’s attention, but your attention might be easily deflated due to the disproportionate elements of the writing. Nadine is over-drawn in some ways and under-drawn in others, and the others characters are under-drawn in totality. Otherwise the book is an existentialist melodrama with a gimmick thrown into the middle of it. But this novel does have unrealized potential and I’d say that Rossner is a better writer than what she creates here. My speculation is that some jerks at her publishing house gave her bad advice on how to make the book more commercially palatable and took it for the sake of sending the book to print. Attachments has enough going for it to make it worth reading once. Just don’t expect too much from it.
February 1, 2022
So, this book was written by the Author who wrote "Looking for Mr. Goodbar". This book is like 45 years old. I got a inter loan library book. When I picked it up and opened the book, It was literally falling apart. As I read it, I found myself thinking. Just as everything was coming together for this strange family, it all went to the wayside.
This is a weird freaky story about conjoined twins who for a time traveled in a freak show circus then go home to live in relative peace together and do car repairs for a living. Then they meet and marry best friends and start making a life together all four of them under one roof.
Soon after the children start coming along things start to fall apart. So, the decision is made to un attach the husbands in a risky surgery. Then things get even more freaky. All the dynamics change. And the men are not the men they were because they are now separate men. To me I found it so sad. They didn't know how to be separate, and the wives didn't want what they had anymore. Because all of them had changed.
This is a weird freaky story about conjoined twins who for a time traveled in a freak show circus then go home to live in relative peace together and do car repairs for a living. Then they meet and marry best friends and start making a life together all four of them under one roof.
Soon after the children start coming along things start to fall apart. So, the decision is made to un attach the husbands in a risky surgery. Then things get even more freaky. All the dynamics change. And the men are not the men they were because they are now separate men. To me I found it so sad. They didn't know how to be separate, and the wives didn't want what they had anymore. Because all of them had changed.
February 28, 2020
Best friends marry conjoined twins. Didn't really go where I thought it would.
January 1, 2025
I didn't think much of this book when it was originally published in 1977, but now that I've had time to experience life a bit more, I think the book is brilliant.
Rossner successfully addresses all the unwelcome realities of becoming an adult and realizing that life doesn't ever turn out the way you imagined.
Of course the conjoined twins are the hook, but the story is much more than that. Marriage, children, betrayal, depression, life.
Rossner successfully addresses all the unwelcome realities of becoming an adult and realizing that life doesn't ever turn out the way you imagined.
Of course the conjoined twins are the hook, but the story is much more than that. Marriage, children, betrayal, depression, life.
July 19, 2020
Read in 1978. Haunting novel about two friends who marry conjoined twins.
November 6, 2021
Will read any day!
January 9, 2026
judith rossner, you are endlessly fun and interested in getting at what makes people tick!!!
February 10, 2008
This is one of my favorite books. It's out of print but if you can find it, I swear it is well worth reading. I've read it probably 5 times or more. I've given copies of this book to all my friends over the years. My son found a copy of it for me a few years ago and I wouldn't let it go for anything in the world. I love this book. This story touches me in so many ways. It's funny and emotional. Nadine wants so much from her relationship with the twins - she's obsessed with the twins. She talks her best friend into meeting them and they end up getting married, the four of them in a marriage - the twins being attached at the waist, and all. And what was wonderful for Nadine before the marriage becomes a burden. Dianne imposes sexual limitations on the four of them and the intense feelings Nadine had prior to the marriage become suppressed. They have children and move to Maine where the men open a car repair shop, Diane works as a lawyer and Nadine takes care of all of them. Then the twins get separated and they find that separate lives are not what they thought it would be. Nadine comes to realize that she thought she loved the men when they were joined, when they were freaks, but finds that may not have been true, even then.
February 8, 2015
I thought this book was witty, and sad, and hilarious all at the same time. The subject makes it sound like it will be a corny story, but it's really not. It's a great character study in which we follow the narrator through many years of experiences. She makes good and bad decisions, but what is most interesting is her thought process while making those decisions. Rossner fans will love this one.
August 5, 2016
I only read this book due to a mistake. I ordered the book Attachments by Rainbow Rowell and received this one instead. I had nothing else to read this weekend, so gave it a try. It was interesting at times, sad much of the time and not something I would have picked up on my own.
November 2, 2020
One of the strangest books I've ever read. Best friends marry siamese twins. And learn valuable life lessons along the way...
February 19, 2010
I read this a very long time ago. My main memories of the book are that it involved siamese twins and I thought it a very strange book indeed!
April 25, 2011
An unusual, weird plot. Kind of incestuous. But doesnt make you feel uncomfortable. Sad in parts.
July 26, 2012
Absolutely bizarre novel about two female friends that marry Siamese twins. Oddly erotic, if that's your fetish.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews