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.

"'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.' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"What do you know of the people closest to you? Only what you see as you face them, a spoke on the wheel of their many relationships. Occasionally, the wheel will shift slightly and you'll catch a jarring flash of their lives beyond you — your father as office shark, your querulous grandmother as bold traveler. It shocks when that happens, for we tend to assume — we seem to need to believe — that... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) what we see in our loved ones is all there is to see.

Mary Gordon must be preternaturally cleareyed, for she recognized that she 'couldn't see my mother properly by standing in one place, by standing still.' To write about her, 'I had to walk around her life, to view it from many points — only one of which was her career as my mother.' And so her memoir 'Circling My Mother' describes not a chronological life, but a full one, one defined by her mother's relationships with the people in it.

But to begin (and end) chronologically: Anna Gagliano Gordon was born in 1908 to a strict Catholic family that eventually came to include nine children. At the age of 3, she contracted polio, which left one leg six inches shorter than the other. She married Gordon's father in her late 30s and miraculously, considering her ravaged body, gave birth to Gordon at 41. She was widowed not too many years later. She died in 2002, at the age of 94.

Those are the bare outlines. In chapters with titles such as 'My Mother and Her Bosses,' 'My Mother and Her Sisters' and 'My Mother and Priests,' Gordon gives us the kaleidoscope, conveying the paradoxes and contradictions of Anna's life without feeling compelled to reconcile them. Thus, we read of her business competence and her ruinous alcoholism, her strength in supporting her large family and her abject surrender to their cruelty, her passion for her husband and her disdain for him, 'such a mixture' she was 'of the coarse and the refined, the banal and the entirely original.'

In writing from many angles, Gordon conjures, as she has in her novels, a world of working-class Catholicism that seems long gone, mythical even. When she was growing up, 'a certain kind of Catholic understood that there were white linen towels kept especially for a priest's visit, so that no cloth but white linen would touch his sacred hands.' And 'there was a kind of unmarried woman who worshipped priests.' Anna was both. She attended spiritual retreats, eventually devoting her annual weeklong vacation to Father Dermot, a downwardly mobile priest living without a parish in Elmira, N.Y., who talked at great length for the edification of Anna and her friends. She lived on 'an idea of eternal salvation.'

So did her husband, who had converted from Judaism and never proved to be the provider Anna had hoped for. They had met at a retreat led by Father Dermot, but 'what the church provided them with could not stand up to the abrasions of the real world, which turned out to be more made up of dailiness than their faith had led them to believe.' Few assessments of marriage are more bleakly accurate, yet Gordon puzzles over reports ('on good authority from friends who were children at the time') that her parents had 'necked publicly.' How to reconcile that with her memory that there wasn't a day they didn't fight? She doesn't. 'I am glad for them,' she writes simply.

Gordon reveals her mother as a wife, an employee, a sister, a friend and a Catholic, but her own relationship with Anna, 'unhealthy in its too-womblike closeness,' naturally overshadows all else. For Gordon knew her mother as no one else could, or would wish to. She'd witnessed Anna's drunken howls of rage over her sisters' betrayal (they'd kicked her out of the family house that she alone had paid the mortgage on). She'd removed the elderly Anna's high-laced boots after they'd been on for months, rotting her feet. She knew what Anna's crippled body and wounded soul were like and what they became in old age. And yet: 'I want to go back where I can meet that mother. Back past affliction, age, disease. This is the trick I want to pull: the trick of bringing the desirable mother back to life. The trick of Resurrection.'

Resurrection is what she nearly achieves in 'Circling My Mother.' But perhaps a better word is re-creation, apt enough for a biographical approach so complete that one wonders why every biography and memoir isn't structured in the same circular fashion.

" Reviewed by Rachel Hartigan Shea, a senior editor at The Washington Post Book World, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

"Gordon's encircled portrait of her mother is a daring and perceptive work of memory, catharsis and literary grace." Los Angeles Times

"What's inspiring about Circling My Mother is Gordon's deeply personal portrayal of her mother." New York Times

"Mary Gordon is a brilliant writer in all senses of that word....Circling My Mother is her strongest work to date, but far from the easiest to read. It is a beautiful, terrible story." Seattle Times

"This memoir may have served a therapeutic purpose for Mary Gordon, but it is much more than that." Miami Herald

"Anna Gordon's wounds may have remained unhealed, but her daughter has found a way to transform them into art." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Gordon weaves unexpected connections...to create an unusually artistic and resonant family portrait." Booklist

Mary Gordon is the author of six novels, two short-story collections, and a memoir about her father, The Shadow Man. She has received the Story Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, and a 1997 O. Henry Award for best story. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.