Customer Reviews

Circling My Mother: A Memoir

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I disagree strongly with the reviews I have seen on this site. It seems to me that this story is about the relationship between a mother and a daughter and all the complications and ambiguous love/hate connections between that mother and daughter. I found myself going back over my own relationship with my mother and although my mother never became an alcoholic there were many painful reminders of how complex connections between mother & daughters are. I think Mary Gordon is a wonderfully talented, evocative writer who touches my heart.

I've loved all of Mary Gordon's work and it was with great anticipation I began this book. Ater five minutes I almost put it aside forever. Plowing through her heavy-handed attempt to relate her mom's 90th birthday with the work of the artist Bonnard left me wondering if Gordon had any way of accessing feelings--certainly a requirement in writing about one's parents.

I persevered and there were some absorbing anecdotes. But what I learned was about Gordon and not about her mother. Perhaps that was the point but it left an unfavorable impression of Gordon. Her many references to her mom's misshapen body were disturbing; her lack of probing into the reasons for things being the way they were left me with the impression that this book was an unequivical cry for attention rather than the exploration of her mom that it was presented to be. For example, she'd pose questions and never answer them. Did my mother "have a secret reading life?" Her answer? "I wouldn't know." Or "I can't imagine why she thought it would be desirable to go on vacation with us." or, "I don't know much about Rita...." We expect that writers will delve into the situation and give us insights into the why or what.

The book is well-organized by chapters into the parts of life that make up a person's life--My mother and her bosses; my mother and her words and music; my mother and her sisters (omitting almost everything about the brothers that must have played more of a role than Gordon presented). The chapters go on--friends; priests; my father; the great world (pretentious as can be); and finally, heartbreakingly, "My mother's body." Crippled. Alcoholic. This is how she describes her mother's body, mixing personality with body, defining the person by loaded labels that convey nothing of the complexity of the human being.

At the end of the last chapter she writes, "I am trying to see my mother. I must begin now to learn how to look." Moving words but it would have been a better book had she done that before she started to write this book.

No one will ever fault Mary Gordon for a lack of frankness or honesty. In the past, she has mined her rather difficult upbringing and family life for short stories, novels, essays and memoirs. Now, with Circling My Mother, she shares intimate details of her often difficult relationship with her mother, a woman afflicted with polio as a young girl and who was looked down upon by most of her relatives despite the fact that she for long periods of time provided the bulk of their financial support.

Rather than using a straight chronological approach to recount her mother's life, Gordon chose to focus on specific ways through which her mother related to the world. In separate chapters she discusses her mother and her bosses, her words and music, her sisters, her friends, her priests, her father, her world view, and her body. However, as Gordon "circles" her mother and explores a different aspect of her character in each chapter, the reader comes to know as much about Mary Gordon as about her mother, Anna. Nothing less is to be expected of an author of Mary Gordon's honesty and, in fact, it is the revelations that Mary makes about herself and her feelings that make Circling My Mother such a powerful book.

Mary Gordon lost her father at an early age and, although her relationship with her mother was an uneasy one at times, the two were close. Mary suffered through her mother's often public displays of alcoholic self-pity and from her sharply critical way with words but, in the end, she is loyal to her mother's memory and defends her actions as only a family member can do it. She accepts criticism of her parents from no one, almost refusing to acknowledge that her mother and father were often as wrong as those she criticizes for causing them grief during their lives.

Circling My Mother is Gordon's attempt to reconcile the guilt that she seems to feel for "abandoning" her mother to a nursing facility in her last years, a facility to which she dreaded to go for the horrible one hour per week that she spent with a mother who no longer recognized her or had control of her mind or body. Her approach to her mother's story paints a human face on a woman who was very much a product of her times but who still managed to achieve more than many women of her day. Anna spent a lifetime as a treasured legal secretary, raised a daughter on her own, supported her brothers and sisters financially until they could do it for themselves, was a staunch supporter of the more traditional Catholic church of the times, and had close friendships with several intellectual priests.

But she could also be a vindictive woman and she resented the way that she was sometimes treated because of her handicap and "place" in life. Mary Gordon seems to have inherited that resentment and she does not try to hide it. Instead, she describes several key relationships in her own life, relationships which helped to make her into the woman that she is today but which she abandoned with little thought or guilt when she no longer needed them. Some of the people cut from her life, such as her truly horrible Aunt Rita, admittedly deserved that treatment but that others who at one time meant so much to Mary Gordon were treated the same way is as surprising as her willingness to expose this weakness in herself to her readers.

Circling My Mother is not a sugarcoated, feel good memoir, the kind that often reads more as fiction than as fact. It is Mary Gordon's honest assessment of her mother's life and how she related to that life. It is the work of a woman not afraid to expose her own weaknesses as part of her writer's craft and, although it is the kind of book that often makes the reader uncomfortable, it should be read especially by those who find themselves caring for elderly parents of their own.

Gordon makes many rookie writer mistakes in this book, which is fairly shocking. For example, she first makes an extended metaphor of her mother's decay in the nursing home to that of Bonnard's mentally ill wife, Marthe, a process Bonnard alchemized in masterly (sexual) paintings of which Gordon reveals her true ignorance. Heightening the heroics of extremity is always a bad literary ploy; the extremity itself is moving enough. There is no metaphor heroic enough for it, none which does not trivialize it, none which does not disrespect the suffering of the protagonist, and none which calls attention to the writer's deficient skills more.
Gordon's intent is to dress up the account of the dementia ward, and instead of achieving the heart-wrenching apotheosis Bonnard does in his nine masterpiece paintings of Marthe in the bathtub -- the last, in which she retains the beauty of her adolescence when they met, was finished after Marthe's death -- Gordon apotheosizes herself.
She writes of her mother's ugliness, incomprehension and ingratitude -- and that of the others on the ward -- while describing her own clothes, the food and flowers she brought to her mother, the color of the plastic forks she brought, the music she played at her mother's funeral, which she knew her mother would hate, intercutting this with description of the Bonnards she acknowledges her mother would hate, and her own beauty and goodness.
Her mother becomes grotesque in this ill-conceived metaphor, and instead of revealing a mother to whom death has restored the beauty of her youth -- as Bonnard does in the final Marthe painting -- we get a pretentious posturing MoMA social climber trying to do an extreme makeover of an under-medicated suffering old woman.
A big misfire.
The rest of her effects -- as she sketches her five aunts, for example -- are similarly unprocessed, undigested, and ill-conceived. If you're going to hold grudges and write about bitchery you need to write about them with impeccable emotional intelligence or the next best thing, impeccable prose. And, any child of alcoholics should know by now that it's not aunt Rita who sends them over the edge, it's alcoholism.

The quite interesting prospect of Irish-Italian immigrant family development -- so well-written, from the Irish aspect, by Frank McCourt* -- is lifelessly rendered here, told not shown, another rookie mistake. The characters are lifeless even though they were real people, and Gordon further exposes the man behind the curtain by saying, as if it were hot news and not a comparison which sucks the life out of her fiction, that this person and that person, so palely rendered here, were the originals of such and such characters in her fiction.

I'm astounded a writer of such prominence and academic success was allowed to publish such an amateur and unedited book. Frankly, it's just not smart enough.

_____________
*Using the compassion of unblinking, unjudging realism instead of metaphor and narcissism.

There is no doubt that this is Mary Gordon's literary remembrance of her actual mother. There should be no lawsuits or discussion in the Oprah circles about its validity. CIRCLING MY MOTHER is like talking to your closest cousin when you've both gotten to be of a certain age; she tells you family secrets you had never known about, you tell her those little ditties from your side of the table, and you both can't believe that the people who committed such acts are related to you. That's how Gordon's memoir made me feel --- like these were people in my own family about whom I was learning new facts. It's so close to the bone that I have to stifle my desire to wrap it in a tourniquet and get the whole shebang to a doctor immediately!

Anna Gagliano Gordon was a single mother, something of a serious Catholic working-class mother who had no time for the pristine pursuits of beauty that her daughter eventually wrapped her life around. Instead, she appreciated a simpler life and dispensed brusque yet experienced pieces of wisdom that Gordon never forgot. But at the time of the book's writing, Gordon's amazingly resilient mom was suffering in a home. At an advanced age, she had been exhibiting signs of forgetting, of not being able to live in the present in the way she had in the past.

So Gordon tells us of the moments in her mother's life and of times in their lives together when she learned what was really at the heart and soul of Anna Gordon. CIRCLING MY MOTHER is heart-wrenching in its details and the matter-of-fact pain that she feels while watching her mother literally lose her grip on reality. It is a remarkable achievement and one that is as difficult to read as it is difficult to forget.

The moments when her mother let down her guard and Gordon is able to relate to us a moment of tenderness between them give the story even greater resonance. An emotional trip with her mother to Italy (where she won the Catholic jackpot and was received by the Pope) and Gordon's own husband (on whom she was having an affair in London) ends with a beautifully touching moment: "...she held my hand in the darkness of the autostrada on the trip back to Rome. The radio played Neil Diamond singing `Song Sung Blue' and she told me it was a wonderful trip, she'd never forget it." A simple woman dispenses simple praise and her anything-but-simple daughter relays it so simply that you can only respond with a simple swelling of your own heart. Simple, yes, but never boring.

It is a testament to Gordon's talent that she constantly straddles the precipice over the cavern of Hallmark Card-dom and never falls in. Her every word is explicit and specific, her every feeling rendered so completely that if you finish CIRCLING MY MOTHER and don't feel as if you know the people in it, you couldn't possibly have read the book.

An elegant woman who succumbed to alcoholism and then dementia, Anna Gordon is compared to the painter Bonnard throughout. He said, at the end of his life, "...people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand." With this book, Gordon starts to really look at her mother now that she is gone and finds herself beginning to understand what could have been the greatest love of her life. CIRCLING MY MOTHER is a beautiful and resonant work that shows Gordon at the height of her literary powers.

--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

The Irish world of Mary Gordon lies somewhere between the brutality of Frank McCourt's and the gentle acceptance of Alice MacDermott's. Gordon feels affinity for Mary McCarthy, who makes a brief, pointed appearance in this memoir. There were times when I had to put it down, unable to bear one more pious cruelty inflicted by Gordon's aunts or another unsparing description of physical decay. Ultimately, though, this is a love story, honoring the determined contributions of her mother, Anne, to Mary's own, happier, life.

Perhaps it's best appreciated by someone old enough to remember when the priesthood was the ultimate achievement a Catholic family might ask of its sons. (The downside of elevating the priesthood seems to have been that the women turned mean or to drink.) By now you know that flesh deteriorates and you're blessed if your children can look at your flaws and love you still.

Certainly Gordon's parents had their flaws. She's written already about her father, who died young, and now we learn about the long decline of her mother, who had polio as a child yet managed to become a valued legal secretary able to support her child and much of her family before she hit the bottle. While Anne toiled, Mary Kate did her homework diligently and wrote many, many poems, and that became the ticket out of this stifling environment, to Barnard College and the world of literature. Although her novel Final Payments remains my favorite, The Company of Women is perhaps her most autobiographical; in Circling My Mother we learn about the real-life model for its Father Ciprian.

I gave this book four stars only because Gordon's refusal to forgive anyone except her parents robs it of a certain grace and transcendence that I find in her fiction. Did I mention that one grandfather was Sicilian?

It appears that Mary Gordon's editors have lost their spine. How else can you explain the better part of a chapter devoted to her Googling Arpege perfume? The author seemed to have run out of words for her chapter and resorted to a high-school term paper ploy of going on an extensive, not terribly interesting, tangent.

There is no question that Mary Gordon has great facility with words. It is a shame that she does not have insight to go with her language skills.

Ms. Gordon criticizes her mother's drunken reciting of old grudges, yet the author spends a great deal of the book detailing all those who didn't appreciate her. This includes numerous friends and family who apparently went out of their way to offer the young Mary their time and hospitality. The author's self-pity comes without the excuse of alcoholism, presumably.

Most galling of all is a chapter in which she wonders what it is her father saw in her mother. The fact that her mother was a polio victim, with one leg shorter in the other, is a sin the author cannot forgive. This despite her mother's infectious laugh, sense of style, and deep spirituality. To the author, physical attraction is a mystery when one of the parties is a cripple. To top it all off, she pities herself as one who was born of someone so afflicted.

The only saving grace in the book is that I did appreciate her mother despite the unflaterring portrayal. And I applauded when she caught her daughter up short. Maybe it is the Irish in me that thinks the author has a swelled head and needed to hear the words of her mother that she can be a "goddamn fool".

Rest in peace, Anna Gagliano Gordon. And don't read your daughter's book.

The concept for this book intrigued me and I loved the image of "circling our mothers" through their lives to more fully understand them as daughters, women, friends, employees, wives, etc. However, I was put off on several fronts. One was the author's vitriolic attacks on family members she felt had turned on her or her mother and let them down in some life-altering way. Again and again we hear the phrase "I will never forgive her." It makes one wonder whether Gordon really ever left the past she so intimately details. Another was the use of her favorite artists as symbolic interpreters of her relationship with her mother and her mother's aging process. A paragraph or two about Bonnard or Vuillard would have been fine - but whole chapters describing paintings that are not in the familiar art cannon of most people? There were some poignant insights into her mother's life through her Catholic faith and the church of the 50's and 60's and a wonderful trail of revelation about her mother through her favorite perfume, but alas, that could not overome the burdensome prose that felt like a wet unforgiving blanket not a peek through a veil to her mother's life.

Circling My Mother is a terrific book, full of sympathy and also empathy for the sometimes difficult people it depicts. Readers who like their memoirs sugar-coated with sentimentality should go elsewhere. Readers who care about great writing and emotional depth will be richly satisfied.

Mary Gordon's mother accomplished a lot, despite her handicaps. Working women of the '50's and '60's are largely forgotten - women who had to work but made it seem glamorous. It was an era when devout Catholics sought out the friendship of priests and held them in awe. I enjoyed the book.