Product Description

In this triumphant return to nonfiction after two critically acclaimed works of fiction, Mary Gordon gives us a rich, bittersweet memoir about her mother, their relationship and her role as daughter.

Anna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, lived a life colored by large forces: immigration, world war, the Great Depression, and physical affliction--she contracted Polio at the age of 3 and experienced the ravages of both alcoholism and dementia. A hard-working single mother--Gordon’s father died when she was still a girl--Anna was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. Yet, even in the face of these setbacks, she managed hold down a job, to dress smartly and raise her daughter on her own, and though she was never a fan of the arts which so attracted Mary, she worshiped the beauty in life in her own way, with a surprising joie de vivre and a beautiful singing voice.

Gordon writes about Anna in all of her roles: sister, breadwinner, woman of faith and single mother. We discover Anna’s wry and often biting humor, her appreciation of life’s simple pleasures, her courage in breaking out of the narrow confines of her birth. Toward the end of Anna’s life, we watch the author take on all the burdens and blessings of caring for her mother in old age, beginning even then to reclaim from memory the vivid woman who helped her sail forth into her own life.

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #442183 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-14
• Released on: 2007-08-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Short story writer, novelist and memoirist Gordon honors her late mother, Anne. Though she died in 2002, Anne was gradually lost to senile dementia years before, stunting Gordon's grief. Now, she explains, I write about her because I am a writer and it's the only way that I can mourn her. Anne emerges as the progeny of her era—a daughter of working-class Catholic immigrants, a Great Depression survivor plagued by the horror of waste, a stalwart woman who provided for a long succession of family members that couldn't (or sometimes wouldn't) support themselves. For all her formidable strength, Anne was vulnerable—her body misshapen by polio, her mind tormented by alcoholism and despair, her tenderness of emotion only conveyed in song. Fans of Gordon's work will recognize familiar conflicts in the people who shaped Anne's life: sisters, friends, priests—men who served as ancillary husbands through her widowhood. As the title suggests, Gordon realizes that understanding Anne wholly is not easily done from any one stance, and so she opts to encircle her, weaving between the realms of memoir and biography. The result is a moving, affecting work on the tug-of-war between mother and daughter, between women and the changing world around them. (Aug.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
"I had hoped to tell not only the story of my mother's life," writes Mary Gordon, "but a larger story, a story that had implications beyond her immediate biography." While highly personal, Gordon successfully places her mother's life in the context of immigration, war, working-class Catholicism, and economic depression. But critics disagree just how effectively-or compassionately-Gordon captures her mother. Part of the disagreement has to do with what some reviewers describe as Gordon's lack of empathy toward Anna's deformity and ugly final days, her jaded perspective, and the episodic, circular narration. For patient readers, however, Gordon offers a haunting, highly rewarding portrait of a complex woman.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
A "word-drunk child," Gordon became a poet, but after a sequence of family tragedies, she switched to writing fiction (Pearl, 2005) and memoirs. The Shadow Man (1996) discloses the harsh truths about her father. Seeing through Places (2000) is a family memoir anchored to her grandmother's joyless house, where Gordon lived after her father's early death. Now, in her third gripping dispatch from the domestic front, Gordon portrays her remarkable mother. Beautiful and glamorous in spite of her polio-induced disability and buoyed by her Catholic faith, Anna took pride in her secretarial career and willingly supported her widowed mother, sisters, and feckless husband. But all her sacrifices and sorrows, particularly the spectacular cruelty of her siblings, brought Anna down, presaging a fall into dementia. Gordon writes with blazing candor, pinpoint perception, and cauterizing lyricism about her mother's suffering and her lost world. Just as women's lives have changed enormously over the decades, Gordon observes, so has the image of the Catholic Church, and long gone is the aura of romance that surrounded priests in their Irish American enclave. Drawing on her gift for sensuous expression and passion for art, Gordon weaves unexpected connections between her mother's life, the paintings of Bonnard and Vuillard, and a history of Arpege, her mother's fragrance, to create an unusually artistic and resonant family portrait. Seaman, Donna

Customer Reviews

An A+ for Circling My Mother
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.

Real Life
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.

A wonderful author goes off course
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.