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Discovering Mary Gordon July 21, 2008 By Alison
Andrews Every few years,
I come across a book that makes me stop and wonder why I haven't
heard of this author before. Most recently, it was a memoir: Circling
My Mother, by Mary Gordon. The writing was so deft and insightful,
handling what must be some of the most challenging material possible--a
sympathetic yet painfully honest treatment of a difficult parent--that
I knew I had to read more of Gordon's work. Overlapping Viewpoints Circling
My Mother is a companion memoir to The Shadow Man, which
tells the story of Gordon's Jewish father and his conversion to
Catholicism. He died when his daughter was seven, and she wrote
in The Shadow Man, “I've always thought that was the most
important thing anyone could know about me." Yet that was not all
there was to know about him: Gordon discovered that nearly everything
she thought she knew about him was a lie. In contrast, Gordon's mother was a constant presence in her daughter's life until she died at age 94. Anna Gagliano was a legal secretary who didn't marry until her late thirties and had her only child at 41. Gordon makes the wise decision not to tell her mother's story chronologically, but in overlapping circles, describing in turn Anna's connection with her sisters, her friends, her work, and her religion. Gordon's great achievement is to present her mother as a paradox--a capable businesswoman in red lipstick and business suits and a bitter alcoholic who suffered the effects of polio. Anna loved her work, not just because it allowed her to support her ungrateful sisters (and later, her daughter), but also because in the office, she was valuable, competent, and important. "If someone wanted to paint a portrait of my mother," writes Gordon near the end of the book, "he would have been wise to paint her at her desk. Where she was happiest. Where she was most at home."
Love and Pain Gordon's relationship
with her mother was complex. She was never sure of her mother's
love and only felt it when they sang together. "Why did you have
to wait for song to let me know what was clearly your great, your
heartbreakingly tender love?" she asks rhetorically. Furthermore,
her mother's misshapen body evoked a sense of ambivalence in her,
as she watched her mother struggle up the stairs to her law firm
or to the theatre. As a child, she could not see her mother's
courage at facing such obstacles. "A body that was a problem, always.
Never a gift," the daughter writes. She wonders how her father could
have been attracted to her mother. And at the end of Anna's life,
the way Gordon describes her mother's body as it breaks down comes
close to cruelty in its brutal honesty. Her attempts to soften the
description by allusions to the work of the French painter Pierre
Bonnard do not quite work, but the blend of pain and love is undeniable
as the book ends. Reality into Fiction The Stories
of Mary Gordon, which contains the stories from an earlier book
along with uncollected and new stories, is worth reading for the
stories' own sake, but I always find it interesting when autobiographical
details are transformed in fiction. Many of the protagonists are
fatherless young girls; “The Thorn” pierces the reader's heart like
the imaginary thorn in the child's heart after her father's death.
In several linked stories, Gordon describes a family of sisters
who resemble her aunts, and one of their daughters has a leg shorter
than the other; she becomes, like Anna Gagliano, a legal secretary.
In Nora, Gordon comes closer to understanding her mother for herself
(rather than as her mother) than in the memoir. Finally, the
Catholic Church figures prominently in Gordon's work. She is not
a mystical or faith-haunted writer; instead, the Catholics in her
stories seek comfort in the strength of the Church, in its rituals
and reassurances. Mary Gordon is not sure there is a transcendent
meaning of life as Christianity asserts; the closest she comes is
in believing in the power of art to transform death into a greater
vision, and at this she succeeds. © 2008, Alison
Andrews --------- Alison Andrews lives near Ft. Worth, Texas, with her husband and two young children. She would like to remind you that reading is a good summertime activity, particularly if you have a refreshing beverage nearby. |
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