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Anxious Attachments
The stunning, intimate essays in Anxious Attachments take us through the life stages of a woman living in the American Southwest from the 1970s to the present. As she moves from adolescence into adulthood, the narrator grapples with attachments that develop through her family and her ties to the wider world around her while she works as a teacher, writer, and caregiver. Though written from a single woman's perspective, these essays invite us to reflect on the many roles women play and the social factors that touch upon them. Alvarado's stories portray a broad world of experience, reflecting on class, race, and poverty in America with emotional depth and sensitivity.
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
168 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 6, 2019
This work is a many-faceted, ever-changing look into how we entangle, ensnare, and transform in each other's lives. The reader almost floats through Alvarado's examination of her life, so easy is it to lose oneself to her world of memory. We are brought to understand the non-linearity of human experience, the non-linearity of human connection, as well as the connectedness of her varied topics.
At times, it is a powerful portrait of how our lives are both greater and smaller than we'd allow ourselves to admit. Through her incisive prose, Alvarado exposes the irony of our instinct that, on seeing our best intentions and actions fall short, we should decide our lives have little consequence on any wider scheme in the world. She creates room for the belief that our actions have reverberations beyond our scope, but her sometimes brutal honesty and repeated self-reproach allow for no grandiosity. She instead examines her family's lives and her own through a large and disciplined lens; one that allows for them to be impactful actors on a universal scale while retaining all the smallnesses that make them human.
The beauty of the collection arises from Alvarado's ability to seamlessly and implicitly intertwine a single life with the world at large. The fairness she extends to each subject lends objectivity to her writing, yet she expertly connects the reader to her tenderly felt experiences. Again and again, the utter directness with which she writes reaches somewhere deep in the reader's subconscious - be it by broaching topics they don't dare encounter, or by shamelessly unburying what we've been told to conceal - and this recurring sensation throughout the collection serves to draw the essays together.
Ultimately, however, what defines the collection is the love that is rendered on every page. Even at its most excruciatingly honest, the reader can't help but be aware that the level of examination and candor are only achieved through Alvarado's great tenderness. Each subject is a world unto themselves, and each is given its due share. The gravity of these worlds meshes beautifully, reaching across the essays, connecting through some unspoken wrinkle - at the core, Alvarado produces an amazing work of heart. An expert achievement in incisive examination, each essay builds into a critical look at how love can entirely shape a world. Love as devotion; love as caustic resentment; love as a bridge for strangers; love as incessant correction; love as isolation; love as constantly worrying about how much you or the world is fucking up your kids; love as the core of what joins us together, the core of what comes to define us, the core of what makes it impossible for us to ever separate.
At times, it is a powerful portrait of how our lives are both greater and smaller than we'd allow ourselves to admit. Through her incisive prose, Alvarado exposes the irony of our instinct that, on seeing our best intentions and actions fall short, we should decide our lives have little consequence on any wider scheme in the world. She creates room for the belief that our actions have reverberations beyond our scope, but her sometimes brutal honesty and repeated self-reproach allow for no grandiosity. She instead examines her family's lives and her own through a large and disciplined lens; one that allows for them to be impactful actors on a universal scale while retaining all the smallnesses that make them human.
The beauty of the collection arises from Alvarado's ability to seamlessly and implicitly intertwine a single life with the world at large. The fairness she extends to each subject lends objectivity to her writing, yet she expertly connects the reader to her tenderly felt experiences. Again and again, the utter directness with which she writes reaches somewhere deep in the reader's subconscious - be it by broaching topics they don't dare encounter, or by shamelessly unburying what we've been told to conceal - and this recurring sensation throughout the collection serves to draw the essays together.
Ultimately, however, what defines the collection is the love that is rendered on every page. Even at its most excruciatingly honest, the reader can't help but be aware that the level of examination and candor are only achieved through Alvarado's great tenderness. Each subject is a world unto themselves, and each is given its due share. The gravity of these worlds meshes beautifully, reaching across the essays, connecting through some unspoken wrinkle - at the core, Alvarado produces an amazing work of heart. An expert achievement in incisive examination, each essay builds into a critical look at how love can entirely shape a world. Love as devotion; love as caustic resentment; love as a bridge for strangers; love as incessant correction; love as isolation; love as constantly worrying about how much you or the world is fucking up your kids; love as the core of what joins us together, the core of what comes to define us, the core of what makes it impossible for us to ever separate.
February 15, 2022
Winner of 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, this book has been on my TBR list for nearly 2 years, possibly longer. The Multnomah County Library (Portland) never ordered it, so I finally used a gift certificate to purchase a used copy from Powell’s Books. Alvarado is a wonderful writer! The essays cover over 30 years of her life ranging from her experience with drugs, to working in a juvenile shelter, to her marriage, the death of her husband from cancer possibly caused by TCE present in Tucson where they both grew up and lived for many years, and what it was like helping care for their daughter’s premature twins during the wildfires in Oregon, where they now live - not knowing if they should try to evacuate, but to where, how could they flee each carrying a baby and a backpack with a baby’s necessities, and what if they couldn’t get away from the flames? I resonate with how she writes about her grief over her husband’s death.
March 8, 2019
This collection of essays takes on grief, loss, and longing from every angle. All of the anxiety that surrounds a loss, before and after it occurs, as well as the idea that you may not even know you are missing something until it is actually missing, was so visceral for me as a reader through Beth's stories. This collection is also very timely, touching on a lot of the collective losses and anxieties about potential loss that we face today in the United States, such as the weakening of our democracy and the destruction of our planet. I loved reading these essays and am sure I will be going back to them again and again.
May 15, 2020
A gorgeous, thoughtful collection that moves through time in the way ours minds do. I particularly appreciated the self confidence and self knowledge that still gave way to occasionally self doubt.
March 4, 2021
(maybe 3.5?)
There was so much to like about these essays--I really liked the feeling of "getting a feel" for Alvarado's close and extended family, and the general communities she found herself in. I liked her essay "Shelter" quite a lot, and "Clarity," too, was so powerful. There is so much about being a mother, being a child, though, in truth, it seems we should divide these things into being a caregiver and being cared-for, since they so often reverse directions and are perhaps never actually clear in the first place. In these essays Alvarado cares for (the young--her children, her grandchildren; the dying--her mother, her husband, other family members; the abandoned and vulnerable--kids living in the shelter, family members with mental illness and addiction), and is also cared for (sometimes by the ones she normally cares for, in grief and anxiety). There are moments of such tenderness, but I also can't help but notice her "anxious attachments" still running through the book--her attachments not just with others, but with herself, her own feelings. The book opens with her "brief" heroin addiction, and at some points it comes up again in other essays, but it felt like the book failed to really examine those parts of herself that she recognizes want to escape, in some very general sense. At times she facing it head on (at the end of "Shelter," for example), and other times she almost avoids it, or even excuses it without looking deeper. There is strangely so little about her own childhood and her relationship with her mother earlier in life, and to some extent it feels like Alvarado can't go deeper into issues of attachment without entering this space and reflecting on how she herself came to be the way she is.
Mostly a side note: I really did like "Shelter" a lot, primarily for the bits of self awareness and honesty it exhibited, but as I read more and more of the book, I started to be so interested in the implication of the last few sentences of that essay:
I quite loved the book for how fully it captured the idea of "family," but I also noticed a strangeness as I came to understand, perhaps, what family is, or what it means. At times it felt like all the closeness the held them together was intrinsically tied to the exclusion of other people and an enhanced fear of outsiders. I can't explain this very well, but it ran through the book so strongly? And perhaps I was so aware of this because I am myself so like the lost kids in the shelter that she left, and already feel conscious of what she articulates at the end of that essay, but it is like I want to love that essay and give herself credit for being honest with herself, but she never actually thinks more deeply about it and questions whether she should do something about it? And to some degree it made me notice more and more how she seemed to do this at other points in the book? She gets close to her own personal selfishness and fear of caring for other people, and she even combines this with a good amount of social justice, but they never really..... enter a level of deep engagement with both. The family a l m o s t has the potential to become political itself, but she can't quite get there? There is so much potential for politicizing care, but it consistently shied away from any kind of l e a r n i n g from and changing because of her self awareness? Must everyone do this work? Must they demonstrate it in their writing, especially in a book of essays written over 40 years? I really don't know, but I do know that it made the book less and less affecting as time went on and she avoided these aspects of what it means to live in the world.
There was so much to like about these essays--I really liked the feeling of "getting a feel" for Alvarado's close and extended family, and the general communities she found herself in. I liked her essay "Shelter" quite a lot, and "Clarity," too, was so powerful. There is so much about being a mother, being a child, though, in truth, it seems we should divide these things into being a caregiver and being cared-for, since they so often reverse directions and are perhaps never actually clear in the first place. In these essays Alvarado cares for (the young--her children, her grandchildren; the dying--her mother, her husband, other family members; the abandoned and vulnerable--kids living in the shelter, family members with mental illness and addiction), and is also cared for (sometimes by the ones she normally cares for, in grief and anxiety). There are moments of such tenderness, but I also can't help but notice her "anxious attachments" still running through the book--her attachments not just with others, but with herself, her own feelings. The book opens with her "brief" heroin addiction, and at some points it comes up again in other essays, but it felt like the book failed to really examine those parts of herself that she recognizes want to escape, in some very general sense. At times she facing it head on (at the end of "Shelter," for example), and other times she almost avoids it, or even excuses it without looking deeper. There is strangely so little about her own childhood and her relationship with her mother earlier in life, and to some extent it feels like Alvarado can't go deeper into issues of attachment without entering this space and reflecting on how she herself came to be the way she is.
Mostly a side note: I really did like "Shelter" a lot, primarily for the bits of self awareness and honesty it exhibited, but as I read more and more of the book, I started to be so interested in the implication of the last few sentences of that essay:
"I was tired, I guess, of being inhabited by others, which was what working with the kids at the shelter felt like. All of those children, their stories got lodged in me, and I could not dislodge them, not even from my dreams. I wished there were some way to transform their sorrows into song, so I could open my mouth and let them pass through me, become air.
But that was a selfish wish, and I knew it. It freed only me, I was thinking only of myself. Those kids, and kids like them, would still exist, they would still need shelter, and I, who knew this, was choosing my own children, as so many of us do, and then walking away."
I quite loved the book for how fully it captured the idea of "family," but I also noticed a strangeness as I came to understand, perhaps, what family is, or what it means. At times it felt like all the closeness the held them together was intrinsically tied to the exclusion of other people and an enhanced fear of outsiders. I can't explain this very well, but it ran through the book so strongly? And perhaps I was so aware of this because I am myself so like the lost kids in the shelter that she left, and already feel conscious of what she articulates at the end of that essay, but it is like I want to love that essay and give herself credit for being honest with herself, but she never actually thinks more deeply about it and questions whether she should do something about it? And to some degree it made me notice more and more how she seemed to do this at other points in the book? She gets close to her own personal selfishness and fear of caring for other people, and she even combines this with a good amount of social justice, but they never really..... enter a level of deep engagement with both. The family a l m o s t has the potential to become political itself, but she can't quite get there? There is so much potential for politicizing care, but it consistently shied away from any kind of l e a r n i n g from and changing because of her self awareness? Must everyone do this work? Must they demonstrate it in their writing, especially in a book of essays written over 40 years? I really don't know, but I do know that it made the book less and less affecting as time went on and she avoided these aspects of what it means to live in the world.
August 4, 2019
Anxious Attachment, by Beth Alvarado, is a beautiful collection of linked essays telling of a life spent with Fernando (boyfriend and later husband) and their children. A searing essay, "A Town Ringed by Missiles," opens the book. Alvarado is just sixteen, living with Fernando, and they're addicted to heroin. At their place, a friend nearly dies from an overdose, and the two see their future and begin a long, difficult struggle to shake the hold this drug has on them. In the process, Alvarado ponders why society doesn't have more compassion for addicts (whose addictions are often related to deeper problems and family traumas). This addiction "is not so different from an alcoholic nor from those among us who need prescriptions to keep the darkness away." In "Shelter," Fernando and Beth are married, with a toddler, when they sign up to run a shelter for children. Her descriptions of the children are heartbreaking and palpable: "They were in a state of cosmic shock, the chronic numbness. Their outrage was on hold. You mean things could have been different? Life wasn't like this for everyone?" The shelter kids are desperate for love, but have no idea how to give and receive it. They'd been knocked around and betrayed by their families. "But I knew how it felt to want to be numb, to want someone to listen, to want someone to love me," she writes. "I knew how it felt to be a small speck of myself, to will myself into invisibility." From this heart-wrenching experience, they move on, settle down, buy a house, and continue with their lives. In other essays, we hear about their children and grandchildren, and we follow her story to the death of Fernando. She concludes this book with "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Grief," where she says that that if you repress the past, you repress and eventually forget all the good times too. Thus, this final chapter acknowledges the pain of Fernando's passing, but honors Fernando's and the joy he brought to Alvarado and their family. It's heart-warming--one of the best collection of personal essays I've read this year.
August 3, 2021
Beth Alvarado's reflective sensibility is lined with wit, insight, and a sharp eye that thoughtfully connects the personal and the public—by which I mean other humans as well as issues of concern. Never maudlin, Alvarado stays close to the sorrow that runs throughout life—all lives—and she does so in a way that invites the reader to both rest in it and transcend it.
What I appreciated most about this book, in addition to Alvarado's honesty and depth, was that I always felt in trustworthy hands. Her use of language and ability to layer events and meaning held me gently but firmly. Sometimes I was stirred with recognition of my own grief and anxious attachments; other times, I was challenged by a new way to think about both; always I felt in the company of someone smart who lives a thoughtful life and knows how to share it so we can all feel a bit less alone.
What I appreciated most about this book, in addition to Alvarado's honesty and depth, was that I always felt in trustworthy hands. Her use of language and ability to layer events and meaning held me gently but firmly. Sometimes I was stirred with recognition of my own grief and anxious attachments; other times, I was challenged by a new way to think about both; always I felt in the company of someone smart who lives a thoughtful life and knows how to share it so we can all feel a bit less alone.
August 26, 2020
Tender Memories and Meditations
I enjoyed reading this collection of essays for many reasons but will share just three. First, the voice that Beth Alvarado creates on the page is honest, direct, and moving. Second, the subjects she explores — love, marriage, parenthood, death, grief, vocation — are the subjects that most matter to us. She is interested in meaning and relationship, and finds meaning *in* relationship. Her musings are not facile, self-congratulatory, or condescending. Finally, Alvarado’s poetic style and her careful examinations, as well as her narrative interludes, appeal to that dimension in me that I will call the spirit.
I enjoyed reading this collection of essays for many reasons but will share just three. First, the voice that Beth Alvarado creates on the page is honest, direct, and moving. Second, the subjects she explores — love, marriage, parenthood, death, grief, vocation — are the subjects that most matter to us. She is interested in meaning and relationship, and finds meaning *in* relationship. Her musings are not facile, self-congratulatory, or condescending. Finally, Alvarado’s poetic style and her careful examinations, as well as her narrative interludes, appeal to that dimension in me that I will call the spirit.
May 25, 2019
This heart-wrenching and heart-opening collection wades into the deepest places of love, loss, grief, and birth, as Beth Alvarado connects her own life to the world we now live in. I found myself laughing, crying, nodding, and learning. What I love most about it is the word "maybe," which is on maybe every page. I felt like I was in a process of inquiry with Beth as she moves her own own learning, and this made it so worthwhile.
May 22, 2019
This book is a love letter in every sense. Beth Alvarado has written an intimate family story that sheds light on our collective humanity. Writing with curiosity, compassion and honesty, Alvarado puts the essay form to best use as she investigates the bonds of addiction, family, and society. Inspiring, moving, always smart and often funny, this book is a lesson in how to write and how to live.
April 3, 2019
Anxious Attachments vulnerable account of love, loss and relationship. Avarado’s essays include political, social issues, and current events making the intimate universal. This essay collection is a delight to read and re-read.
June 13, 2019
This book is wide-ranging. From heroin to babies, climate change to cancer, Beth Alvarado takes the reader through difficult material. She does it with such grace and tenderness that no matter what the subject, she is the one I want as a guide.
April 18, 2023
I don't have words to describe the effect reading this book had on me. I don't know if it's because many of the essays touch on grief, or because I know the main characters, or because I read this book in my Dear Departed Dad's hometown of Bacolod, a place I hadn't deeply explored, not in many years. The experience of reading it was profound and cathartic, and I know I will re-read.
August 19, 2022
amazing stories, amazing life. Beth goes deep with honesty and offers it up to the reader with grace.
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