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Circling My Mother: A Memoir
by
Mary Gordon
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 contr...more
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 contr...more
Hardcover, 288 pages
Published
January 21st 2009
by Pantheon
(first published August 14th 2007)
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Aug 12, 2008
Sandra
rated it
3 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Anyone who like Mary Gordon, or likes memoirs
Shelves:
memoirs,
non-fiction
This book really makes one think about their relationship with their mom. I admired Mary's frankness. I wonder what her mother would have thought about all this? It was also interesting to read how Catholicism played such a huge role in how her mom saw the world, and those non Catholics who inhabited it. It made me remember the little Catholic girls in the neighborhood I grew up in. Her mom was really quite a remarkable woman. I am not sure that is what Mary believes, or wants us to believe.
Mar...more
Mar...more
This story starts with the heartbreak of Gordon's mother living in a nursing home and works backwards to tell her story as a working mother, as the sister who helped the family financially, as the breadwinner when her husband's ventures fail and after his death, and as the devoted Catholic, all while disabled from polio.
Gordon is unflinchingly honest as she illuminates the context of her mother's challenging and yet often fulfulling life. She shares details that obviously has been incorporated i...more
Gordon is unflinchingly honest as she illuminates the context of her mother's challenging and yet often fulfulling life. She shares details that obviously has been incorporated i...more
I read this book first and the memoir about her father (The Shadow Man, written in 1996) second. For me, that was the correct order. I think that if I had read the book about her father first, what I knew about the father would have gotten in the way of my understanding of the mother.
Circling My Mother was a fascinating attempt by the daughter to try to understand her mother. The title is perfect as Mary Gordon never does entirely understand her mother as she keeps trying (circling), unearthing...more
Circling My Mother was a fascinating attempt by the daughter to try to understand her mother. The title is perfect as Mary Gordon never does entirely understand her mother as she keeps trying (circling), unearthing...more
I just re-read this for my upcoming presentation @ library; I had read it and presented a conference paper on it when it was originally published. I think it is an excellent memoir by virtue of its style ("circling" the mother via a series of chapters that can each stand alone as essays, providing differing, yet overlapping, views); Gordon's facility with language; her stellar use of the art of Vuillard and, especially, Bonnard, and of the artistic rendering on Lanvin's Arpege bottle to yield di...more
Dec 29, 2010
Julie Davis
added it
I already was not looking forward to reading this book as it is not the sort of book I generally enjoy. However, I have been proven wrong before by other book club selections, if for no other reason than talking about a book would help me to understand it better even if I did not enjoy it.
There is no such redemption for this selection. My standard "trial period" for a book is the first 50 pages. After page 32 I could continue no longer. Hopefully the author redeems herself by the end but what I...more
There is no such redemption for this selection. My standard "trial period" for a book is the first 50 pages. After page 32 I could continue no longer. Hopefully the author redeems herself by the end but what I...more
Well, I'm going to take a page from Kristi's book, and start a review mid-book.
Circling My Mother is this year's One Book, One Saint Mary's book selection. And to be honest, I'm having trouble figuring out why it was chosen. Less than 100 pages in, the book comes across as incredibly bitter and self serving. The author appears to be using this book to express her hurt feelings and share the difficult times she went through, most of which she blames on her family. She spends a lot of space compla...more
Circling My Mother is this year's One Book, One Saint Mary's book selection. And to be honest, I'm having trouble figuring out why it was chosen. Less than 100 pages in, the book comes across as incredibly bitter and self serving. The author appears to be using this book to express her hurt feelings and share the difficult times she went through, most of which she blames on her family. She spends a lot of space compla...more
This is the second book I've read by Mary Gordon. I have an ambivalent attitude toward her as a writer. She writes well, but I think I don't like her as a person. (It would be interesting to see what I thought if I met her.) Mary Gordon's book about her mom is a lot about her herself, really. And she seems to harbor a lot of grudges and ill-will toward people in her family. Her self-pride--particularly about her childhood precocity--also seeps through a lot in an annoying way. I did the book int...more
Feb 05, 2009
Bookmarks Magazine
added it
"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
...more
You can tell a poet wrote this book; the language is lovely and lyrical. "Circling My Mother" is an apt title, because that's what Gordon seems to do as a writer; she circles her mother, studies her, observes her both in the present and in the past. The book is just as much about some of her extended family as it is about her mother. The book seems to have been written to help her process the relationship, and I wonder if it helped her come any closer to doing so. It was really like watching som...more
While I appreciated Gordon's strong evocation of life for a pious Catholic in the 40's and 50's, and while I saw Gordon's desire to somehow explore how she herself had come to be who she is, I didn't feel her mother really came through. So much of who her mother was was colored for Gordon by what she became - demented. I know this is a memoir, but I found that focus on the sadly diminished, unapproachable mother, to be surprising. The glimpses of the childhood mother Gordon provides are warm and...more
An upsetting book in some ways -- Mary Gordon's mother was very ill and very difficult in her later years -- but it's also rich with the stories of how Catholic women dealt with the world in the 20's, 30's, & 40's. I also loved the parts about her mother's friends and how nurturing they were of Mary Gordon when her father died. Most of her aunts -- the "Gagliano" girls -- were awful though. Mixed marriages were tough in those days, and there is a lot of mix here. (Gordon's grandmother was Ir...more
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...more
After reading this (actually 3/4 before I flung it down in disgust)I wouldn't shake Mary Gordon's hand if she held it out to me. A memoir is all about personal perspective but hers is so bitter and warped and skewed and I don't ask for facts in my memoirs, not necessarily, but it seems so EXAGGERATED. For proof read the chapter about her Aunts and how she paints them in the vilest, bitterest colors and how she is just a sensitive child who was so terribly treated - I think I threw it down after...more
Ultimately I felt this book was a good draft, allowing the author the opportunity to play with a unique structure (as she presents it, neither memoir nor biography) and get some things off her chest about her mother, her mother's life (and decline), and others closely connected to both her mother and herself. For me, knowing neither the author nor her mother, I found the voice discontinuous, sometimes that of the small child, sometimes the adolescent, sometimes the adult, but only for moments th...more
An interesting way to tackle the subject. Ms. Gordon wrote about "My Mother and Her Bosses," "My Mother and Her Sisters," "My Mother and Priests," etc. She began with a chapter "Bonnard (an artist Ms. Gordon likes) and My Mother's Ninetieth Birthday" and ends with "Bonnard and My Mother's Death." In this way, she circles her mother.
A memoir about a complex mother-daughter relationship, the author's tone is self-involved and excessively self-important. Even though each chapter's title begins with "My Mother and ___," the author makes this more a story about her own internal ruminations -- including an excessive use of literary/philosophical/artistic references -- and as a result provides a fairly two dimensional rendering of her mother. The author and her mother appear to have had a relationship that was part love, resentme...more
I read this as a companion book to Company of Women for a friend. It was better than the other book, but once again the same phrases kept coming up. The author seems very full of herself even though it was supposed to be about her mother.
This book is kind of a disaster. It has a few interesting anecdotes but really it is full of banal (sometimes baffling) observations from someone who is presumably too literate to know better.
Among other things it was facinating to be introduced to the real people behind many of the characters in her books.
"Maybe someday" and "priority? are conflicted but there you have it. I want to read but don't do enough of it.
What a beautifully written book, a memoir of a woman who wants to remember all aspects of her mother....
Mary Gordon didn't have one good thing to say about her mother - far too angry a memoir for me.
Couldn't make it past the first chapter, it was too boring.
A lovely and difficult memoir.
this is one of the most beautiful, realistic depictions of a mother-daughter relationship that i've ever encountered. you will find little nostalgia here, little navel-gazing, but instead two complex, tangible, human women. gordon employs a mixture of detective work, personal reflection, and close readings of family "texts" (photographs, marginalia, travels) to "circle" her mother. ultimately, though, she can only circle her, never truly capture her; sometimes the ones we are closest to are the...more
I'm interested in memoir forms. In this one, Gordon devotes separate chapters to her mother's relationships with family members, bosses, priests, words and music, even world view. The multi-faceted approach adds up to a full, dynamic portrait of Gordon's mother, and reveals Gordon to the reader, as well.
Wonderful
Received as a gift - might not have chosen this book myself but glad I read it. A lot of this book centered about Mary Gordon's catholic upbringing, the church, the priests etc, very interesting. Mary cares for her mother who quite frankly is not that easy to love. Pretty good read, happy to lend it out if anyone wants it.
On something of a memoir kick of late, I found that this book resonated because of my own struggles with my parents' aging. The book has a deeply melancholy tone, but the author also celebrates qualities of her mother and her mother's life. Though the pages are steeped in sadness, there is something about the high quality of the writing that renders the book a form of sustenance. It's well worth your time if you have mixed feelings about your family history -- and who doesn't?
I could not put this book down, heartbreaking,funny,poignant.
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Mary Gordon was born in Far Rockaway, New York, to Anna Gagliano Gordon, an Italian-Irish Catholic mother, and David Gordon, a Jewish father who converted to Catholicism. While growing up, she attended Holy Name of Mary School in Valley Stream and for high school attended The Mary Louis Academy in Jamaica, N.Y.. She is Catholic.
She received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1971, and her M.A. from...more
More about Mary Gordon...
She received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1971, and her M.A. from...more
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Mar 09, 2012 05:23am