Customer Reviews

Circling My Mother

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

"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.

Impossible to overlook is the powerful "Circling My Mother" by Mary Gordon. It's a difficult read: emotional, hard-edged--but so deep. I read it while DF's mother was dying last October. I have not been in a place to even recommend it until this very moment. So, please don't overlook this book, especially if you are dealing with mother-issues.

If you're looking for a pleasant read, RUN AND HIDE. If you enjoy persistent parallels between a mother described as "rotting" and an artist (Pierre Bonnard -- sorry, I'd never heard of him either, I'm just an American with an advanced degree in something other than art), enjoy the ride!

Take a hint from the chapter titles: "My Mother and Her Bosses," "My Mother and Her Sisters," "My Mother and Priests." This book is a long, slow, snooooozzzzzzzzzzzze.

Do yourself a favor, and read Christopher Buckley's "Losing Mum and Pup" instead. I'm no right-winger, but I like to enjoy what I read, and learn from it.

TO SUM:

If you want to learn how to wash rotting feet, go ahead and read "Circling My Mother."

But if you want to read something interesting, involving, or enlightening, DON'T.