Themes In Francine Cournos City Of One: A Memoir?

Humans need love and attachments like we need water and air. As we move throughout our lives from babies to adults, attachments have essential roles to play from making sure our biological needs are met to providing us with comfort, trust, and a sense of interconnectedness. Since attachments are such an integral and emotional part of our lives, it makes sense that when we are separated from or lose people we are attached to it can be an excruciating experience. For children losing attachment figures can be an especially scarring experience leaving wounds that may last into adulthood and well beyond. Such was the case for a woman named Francine Cournos, author of City of One: A Memoir. In her book, Cournos describes her growing up years, which were filled with loss of many she loved, and describes …show more content…
Cournos’s story is a deep, complex narrative from which dozens of themes could be extracted. However, for my purposes of examining this book from an attachment theory perspective, there were a couple of main attachment themes that I saw running throughout the book. The first of themes is the psychological effects that the loss of her attachment figures in her childhood caused throughout her life. Throughout the entirety of the book, Cournos describes the intense anxiety, depression, and guilt that were a result of the loss of her attachment figures, particularly her mother. For instance, she details how every illness, every sore she encountered on her body caused a flood of panic that she was dying of cancer just like her mother. In other places she lets the reader peek into her panicked, guilt-filled mind which believes that she has some wicked power that makes those she attaches to disappear. Later on, she describes the guilt and depression she felt about how she was able to live such a healthy and successful life while those she loved had