Circling My Mother

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.

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.

The New York Times - Darcey Steinke

These days, we seem to have two kinds of religious books. Those like The Purpose-Driven Life,…insipidly set out conservative precepts, encouraging us to join churches, obey their doctrines and center our spiritual lives around them, no matter how limiting those lives might be in that context alone. At the other end of the spectrum are gleeful repudiations of religion like Christopher Hitchens's atheist manifesto, God Is Not Great. But Hitchens's definition of religion is childlike and reductive; he completely discounts the longing many of us feel for divinity. What's inspiring about Circling My Mother is Gordon's deeply personal portrayal of her mother. Anna Gagliano is not someone who feels she must have large ideas about what's wrong with Catholicism. Instead, like those famous midcentury Catholics, Gordon's mother attends to the nourishment of her own particular religious vocation, a vocation less glamorous than Merton's and Day's but no less divine—a vocation as a single mother, as one afflicted by polio, as a woman in full belief of the love of God.

The McIntosh Professor of English at Bamard College, Mary Gordon is the author of several acclaimed novels that deal with the conflicts facing modern women, including Spending and Pearl, as well as a stirring memoir about her father, The Shadow Man.