CIRCLING MY MOTHER: A Memoir
Mary Gordon
Pantheon
Memoir
ISBN: 9780375424564

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, "…people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand." With this book, Gordon starts to really look at her mother now that she is gone and finds herself beginning to understand what could have been the greatest love of her life. CIRCLING MY MOTHER is a beautiful and resonant work that shows Gordon at the height of her literary powers.

   --- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

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