Circling My Mother

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.

"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.

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.

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, ".

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.