Circling My Mother: A Memoir

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 into painful financial and emotional situations. The memoir is a series of flashback, but it opens with a current scene: Mary is planning a birthday party for her mother in the nursing home where she is an Alzheimer's patient. The distance show more between the two women could not be more blatant, and yet...you still feel that bizarre, ineluctable, almost gravitational pull between them.

So kudos to Gordon for tapping into that. This memoir really resonated with me, even though my own relationship with my mother is utterly different from Gordon's; and I think that is because Gordon locked on to some universal truths about mothers and daughters. It's sad, though. I felt a bit weepy when I was done - not so much because of their tender love (nope, not that) but because of the sort of tragic mix of love and pain, pull-together and pull-apart. show less

No one will ever fault Mary Gordon for a lack of frankness or honesty. In the past, she has mined her rather difficult upbringing and family life for short stories, novels, essays and memoirs. Now, with Circling My Mother, she shares intimate details of her often difficult relationship with her mother, a woman afflicted with polio as a young girl and who was looked down upon by most of her relatives despite the fact that she for long periods of time provided the bulk of their financial support.

Rather than using a straight chronological approach to recount her mother’s life, Gordon chose to focus on specific ways through which her mother related to the world. In separate chapters she discusses her mother and her bosses, her words and show more music, her sisters, her friends, her priests, her father, her world view, and her body. However, as Gordon “circles” her mother and explores a different aspect of her character in each chapter, the reader comes to know as much about Mary Gordon as about her mother, Anna. Nothing less is to be expected of an author of Mary Gordon’s honesty and, in fact, it is the revelations that Mary makes about herself and her feelings that make Circling My Mother such a powerful book.

Mary Gordon lost her father at an early age and, although her relationship with her mother was an uneasy one at times, the two were close. Mary suffered through her mother’s often public displays of alcoholic self-pity and from her sharply critical way with words but, in the end, she is loyal to her mother’s memory and defends her actions as only a family member can do it. She accepts criticism of her parents from no one, almost refusing to acknowledge that her mother and father were often as wrong as those she criticizes for causing them grief during their lives.

Circling My Mother is Gordon’s attempt to reconcile the guilt that she seems to feel for “abandoning” her mother to a nursing facility in her last years, a facility to which she dreaded to go for the horrible one hour per week that she spent with a mother who no longer recognized her or had control of her mind or body. Her approach to her mother’s story paints a human face on a woman who was very much a product of her times but who still managed to achieve more than many women of her day. Anna spent a lifetime as a treasured legal secretary, raised a daughter on her own, supported her brothers and sisters financially until they could do it for themselves, was a staunch supporter of the more traditional Catholic church of the times, and had close friendships with several intellectual priests.

But she could also be a vindictive woman and she resented the way that she was sometimes treated because of her handicap and “place” in life. Mary Gordon seems to have inherited that resentment and she does not try to hide it. Instead, she describes several key relationships in her own life, relationships which helped to make her into the woman that she is today but which she abandoned with little thought or guilt when she no longer needed them. Some of the people cut from her life, such as her truly horrible Aunt Rita, admittedly deserved that treatment but that others who at one time meant so much to Mary Gordon were treated the same way is as surprising as her willingness to expose this weakness in herself to her readers.

Circling My Mother is not a sugarcoated, feel good memoir, the kind that often reads more as fiction than as fact. It is Mary Gordon’s honest assessment of her mother’s life and how she related to that life. It is the work of a woman not afraid to expose her own weaknesses as part of her writer’s craft and, although it is the kind of book that often makes the reader uncomfortable, it should be read especially by those who find themselves caring for elderly parents of their own.

Rated at: 4.0 show less

This book had a huge impact on me and I'm very grateful for Gordon to have had the courage to write so honestly about her relationship with her mother. You cannot judge a person unless you have walked in her shoes. What Gordon helped me to see was that if she could say the things she said about her mother and publish them, then I could say like things about my own mother in my private pages. When you have a parent who is monstrously not a parent, you feel very much alone. Gordon helped me to feel not so alone. I fantasize about getting a phone call in the small hours of the night from my mother's nursing home: "We're sorry, but your mother has died." Then I wonder to myself, what kind of a person fantasizes about her own mother's death? show more Gordon said of her mother: "She needed some kind of help. I would give her help. But I would not give her my life."

Mary Gordon went through some very rough years with her mother. She was old and ill and had dementia. She was living in a nursing home because Gordon simply could not take care of her in her home.

The voice of Gordon's memoir is superbly controlled. Think *Mommie Dearest* and then think the total opposite of that. This is the most courageous memoir I've ever read. show less

This book made me think a lot about my own mother and grandmother, outside and beyond their relationship to me. I don't often consider them as women on their own, certainly not as much as perhaps I ought to. It's helpful, especially as I examine my relationship with my own mum, to keep in mind that she had a life before me, and that my grandmother had a life before her. It adds a dimension I'm glad to be reminded of.

I also really like the idea of a long line of female ancestors. That idea doesn't really get developed in the book, probably for lack of genealogical information, but the thought is tangentially articulated. All in all, it's one of the better mother-daughter relationship memoirs I've read.

I found this to be a fascinating memoir, I liked the structure, found it relevant for how to think in retrospect about the complex, life-long saga that is the relationship of a mother and daughter.

A very skilled writer and a very well-written book. Her technique truly circled her mother, so that we got a well-rounded picture of her, with just a slight hole in the middle - what was their relationship like?

Indeed it is a tribute to Ms. Gordon's mother. I picked up this book every spare moment I had and so wanted to write the author to tell her how much I enjoyed her writing. I will definitely read Shadow Man, the book she wrote about her father.