Circling My Mother [Paperback]

Mary Gordon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 2008

Anna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. A hard-working single mother – Mary Gordon's father died when she was still a girl – she managed to hold down a job, dress smartly, raise her daughter on her own, and worship the beauty in life with a surprising joie de vivre. Bringing her exceptional talent for detail, character, and scene to bear on the life of her mother, Gordon gives us a deeply felt and powerfully moving book about their relationship. Toward the end of Anna's life, we watch the author care for her mother in old age, beginning to reclaim from memory the vivid woman who helped her sail forth into her own life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A daring and perceptive work of memory, catharsis and literary grace.” —Los Angeles Times“Unflinching. . . . Gordon shows a piercing understanding of the way childhood slights and family squabbles reverberate through the generations.” —The New Yorker“Revelatory. . . . Wrenching and enlivening, resonant with candid emotion.” —The Boston Globe“Gordon is in a class by herself. . . . A brilliant writer in all senses of that word; a gifted craftsperson, original scholar, unflinching observer of self and others. . . . Her strongest work to date.” —The Seattle Times

About the Author

Mary Gordon is the author of the novels Spending, The Company of Women, The Rest of Life, Final Payments,The Other Side, and Pearl; the short story collections Temporary Shelter and The Stories of Mary Gordon; and the memoir The Shadow Man. She has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1997 O. Henry Award for best story. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (October 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307277615
• ISBN-13: 978-0307277619
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #395,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Looking at a long and sometimes sad life, November 3, 2008

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Circling My Mother (Paperback)

Mary Gordon's mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon, married late in life and gave birth to Mary when she was forty-one years old. Her husband, Mary's father, died when Mary was seven. Anna lived to be ninety-four. She spent the last years of her life in a state of severe dementia and couldn't even remember who Mary was.

After her death in 2002, Mary felt compelled to try to understand more about this woman that had been her mother-a woman she had almost come to hate in the last difficult years. As a writer, the best way she could think of to come to terms with her mother and her own feelings about her was to write. Thus, she wrote this book. It is a combination of memoir-Mary's memories of how she perceived her mother at different stages of life, and also biography of the woman for whom motherhood was only a part of her lifelong personhood.

The chapters in the book each approach Anna Gordon's life from a different perspective. They describe her in relation to her sisters, her friends, priests and the Catholic Church, her husband and others. Each of these vantage points offers a bit more insight into the woman-and gives Mary Gordon a deeper understanding of her mother.

Anna Gordon was a victim of polio as a young child and having her left leg six inches shorter than the right put her in the disabled column her whole life. It also caused her to become rather misshapen in her later years. Nonetheless she was a lovely woman and a competent woman in the working world, supporting her family, including her husband, until she retired.

Mary Gordon paints her mother's personality with care, but not with sentimentality. She is trying to understand the woman she loved and hated, and in the telling also shares a great many insights about herself.

It's is an interesting book, though probably not everyone's cup of tea. It would not be on my list of favorite memoirs.

(Originally in hardcover by Pantheon Books in August 2007)

Armchair Interviews says: Unique point of view.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Life Under a Microscope, December 17, 2008

By 

B. A Libby (Camano Island, Wa United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Circling My Mother (Paperback)

As Mary Gordon's 94 year old mother sank deeper into dementia, she felt compelled to write of her mother's life. She wanted to understand the multiple dimensions of a long life, rather than the simplistic "parent" niche most children assign their parents. The title of the book refers to the author viewing her mother's life from many aspects; her childhood, her siblings, her career, her loves and hurts. Underscoring this search is a tremendous need to understand why her mother was not more loving to her only child. The author traces her mother's life, the people who influenced it, and tries to apply understanding to her mother's actions. The writing in this book is terrific. Any single sentence in this book shines as an example of really skilled and heartfelt prose. But the story is terribly, terribly personal. To try to reconstruct a complex life with only information that memory or diligent research can uncover makes an unfulfilling book. It becomes clear that the author's tremendous guilt is coloring her memories of the actions of other people. It may be satisfying for the author, but brings into doubt all of her interpretations. She writes with real anger at a woman who loaned her father money, and then had the nerve to ask for repayment. She sees this as a terrible betrayal. Each of her mother's sisters is dissected, and found culpable for her mother's unhappiness. In fact, Mary Gordon does not write with true affection about anyone. I'm certain that I could understand my mother's life better. But to write a book about it would be (no doubt) good for me, and not very interesting to anyone else. This book should have been kept as a diary, perhaps passed on to the next generation in the family. And perhaps we all should try for the 360 view of our parents, but not expect anyone else to find it compelling.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Mystery of An Impossible Love, March 16, 2009

By 

John Thorndike "Author: The Last of His Mind:... (Athens, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Circling My Mother (Paperback)

"My mother's body is inexorably failing, but not fast enough. She is still more among the living than the dying, and I wonder, often, what might be the good of that."

Mary Gordon's question, coming in the first few pages of Circling My Mother, lets us know how direct her gaze can be. "I am afraid," she writes, "that the emptiness at the center of my mother's life is neither beautiful nor graceful but a blankness that has become obdurate, no longer malleable enough even to contain sadness... And there is nothing I can do about it. Nothing."

When someone writes as well as Gordon, I will follow her anywhere. I've read twenty-five memoirs on Alzheimer's, and never found anything as fierce and honest as the opening and closing chapters of Circling My Mother. Those chapters don't float there on their own, of course, they depend on the descriptions of her mother's youth and middle years. The great interior vault of the book is a perfectly-cadenced description of a parochial, judgmental woman consumed by her Catholic faith--but a woman who also had friends and siblings, who worked at a job for twenty-five years, who raised her daughter with a stubborn devotion.

We hear a great deal about the younger Anna Gagliano Gordon, as a spunky young girl and an opinionated woman. But it's her long decline and final years that gripped me by the throat. After eleven years in a nursing home, she no longer knows her daughter. She sits in a chair, her head in her hands, rocking among the other slack-jawed residents. "It is impossible," Mary Gordon writes, "for me to say that what has happened to these people is not a slow disaster."

We come to the end of the book, to the last forty pages, to the grimmest scenes. The author now finds her mother's presence unbearable. "The sight of her blackening teeth, now only stumps; her hair, scraped down almost to her scalp; above all the smell of her made me panic, made me want to cover my face with my hands and cry out, `I can't, I can't, I can't do this."

Yet only a few pages later, Mary Gordon, the non-believer, explains that her writing is a kind of prayer, that she writes about her mother to witness to "the mystery of an impossible love."

No one writes like Mary Gordon, with complete balance and a brutal honesty. She can be hard on other people--but she's hardest on herself. If I could give this book six stars, I would.