Circling My Mother: A Memoir

by Mary Gordon

Hardcover, 2007

Status

Checked out

Genres

Biography & Memoir

Biography

Fiction

Publication

Pantheon (2007), Edition: First Edition, 272 pages

Description

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.

User reviews

LibraryThing member emigre

Gordon's writing is so skillful that even when she writes about everydays events, the humor, irony, and epiphanies of life shine through.

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LibraryThing member bobbieharv

A very skilled writer and a very well-written book. Her technique truly circled her mother, so that we got a well-rounded picture of her, with just a slight hole in the middle - what was their relationship like?

LibraryThing member labwriter

This book had a huge impact on me and I'm very grateful for Gordon to have had the courage to write so honestly about her relationship with her mother. You cannot judge a person unless you have walked in her shoes. What Gordon helped me to see was that if she could say the things she said about her

mother and publish them, then I could say like things about my own mother in my private pages. When you have a parent who is monstrously not a parent, you feel very much alone. Gordon helped me to feel not so alone. I fantasize about getting a phone call in the small hours of the night from my mother's nursing home: "We're sorry, but your mother has died." Then I wonder to myself, what kind of a person fantasizes about her own mother's death? Gordon said of her mother: "She needed some kind of help. I would give her help. But I would not give her my life."

Mary Gordon went through some very rough years with her mother. She was old and ill and had dementia. She was living in a nursing home because Gordon simply could not take care of her in her home.

The voice of Gordon's memoir is superbly controlled. Think *Mommie Dearest* and think the total opposite of that. This is the most courageous memoir I've ever read.

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LibraryThing member 2chances

I have to say, I find books about mother-daughter relationships weirdly fascinating. I like the title metaphor of this one: I can remember being a little girl who would wander away from my mother and find myself, moments later, drawn back into her orbit, a moon that could only stray so far and no

further. Gordon's relationship with her mother is a trying one; her mother was a "working mother" when no mothers worked outside the home, and her father's premature death placed the mother and daughter into painful financial and emotional situations. The memoir is a series of flashback, but it opens with a current scene: Mary is planning a birthday party for her mother in the nursing home where she is an Alzheimer's patient. The distance between the two women could not be more blatant, and yet...you still feel that bizarre, ineluctable, almost gravitational pull between them.

So kudos to Gordon for tapping into that. This memoir really resonated with me, even though my own relationship with my mother is utterly different from Gordon's; and I think that is because Gordon locked on to some universal truths about mothers and daughters. It's sad, though. I felt a bit weepy when I was done - not so much because of their tender love (nope, not that) but because of the sort of tragic mix of love and pain, pull-together and pull-apart.

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LibraryThing member cat-ballou

This book made me think a lot about my own mother and grandmother, outside and beyond their relationship to me. I don't often consider them as women on their own, certainly not as much as perhaps I ought to. It's helpful, especially as I examine my relationship with my own mum, to keep in mind that

she had a life before me, and that my grandmother had a life before her. It adds a dimension I'm glad to be reminded of.

I also really like the idea of a long line of female ancestors. That idea doesn't really get developed in the book, probably for lack of genealogical information, but the thought is tangentially articulated. All in all, it's one of the better mother-daughter relationship memoirs I've read.

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LibraryThing member bhagerty

I found this to be a fascinating memoir, I liked the structure, found it relevant for how to think in retrospect about the complex, life-long saga that is the relationship of a mother and daughter.

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