An intense, poetic, and almost uncomfortably honest book ... One of the book’s most powerful motifs is Mann’s confrontation with the limitations of language.
What Mann’s attempting to do, here and elsewhere in the collection, is metabolize his own experience as a child by way of his life as a parent. Yet, rather than use his child as an object through which to live (or relive, as it were), he engages her with a curiosity that, though jaded by age, remains imbued with possibility ... The writer is a messy parent, but so are we all. Here and elsewhere, Mann’s neuroses aren’t distractions—they’re the primary sites of inquiry.
Parenthood in general, and modern fatherhood in particular, proves to be an ideal subject for Mann’s approach. The strange mix of self-deprecation and self-congratulation produces a figure of humor and even pathos ... I loved Attachments. It made me feel, as they say, seen ... Yet I also detected a reticence within the book. Mann recognizes how much the narrow frame of the Bad Dad Joke leaves out, while also acknowledging how tempting, even comforting, it is to contort oneself to fit into it, to live down to expectations, to reduce one’s heartache to a punny punch line, even when one knows better.
While Mann's writerly style, rife with references and quotes from past and contemporary writers, may imply an audience of fellow writers, he consistently offers sublime reflections on the nuances of parent-child relationships ... A heartfelt, perceptive, profoundly introspective journey into the realm of parenthood.
