Mama Dearest

It sells copies, gets you talked about, and best of all, you cannot be blamed for the hurt you cause, for you are a brave truth-teller.

Novelist Mary Gordon, author of In The Company of Women and Final Payments, among other works, has joined this last unhappy group by writing a pitiless, self-regarding remembrance of her mother’s life that will surely be enjoyable only to her fans. It’s hard to imagine any other sort of reader who would wish to spend time in the narrative company of a woman who reveals herself on virtually every page to be as humorless, pretentious, and unforgiving as Gordon does. It is like spending the evening with a vampire.

In Circling My Mother, the author sets out to look at different aspects of Anna Gagliano Gordon, an apparently rather coarse, contemptuous woman who was born in 1908 and died at the age of 94. Anna had four sisters, each more difficult than the one before. She was disfigured by polio when she was three; she married only in midlife, gave birth to Mary Catherine, lost her husband to a heart attack, and eventually ran disastrously to drink. Gordon uses the device of successive chapters devoted to Anna’s various relationships: with her employers, friends, sisters, Roman Catholic priests, with Gordon’s adored father David, with music, and her own (that is, Anna’s) polio- and alcohol-wracked body.

It’s a clever way to try representing someone else’s life, and it might have succeeded had Gordon been able to keep from thrusting herself to the fore of everything. As it is, the most important word in the title of this dismal exercise is “my,” and the memoir’s main purpose seems to be to express wordy wonderment that so splendid a specimen as Mary Gordon could have sprung from such bitter, chalky soil.

Gordon begins by posing questions–a rhetorical affectation that persists throughout. “What would a book like this be called?” she asks of the work she has just published. “Memoir? Biography?” The author isn’t sure. But she swiftly overcomes her confusion by drawing our attention to the artist Pierre Bonnard, who painted The Bathroom in the year Anna Gagliano was born. Bonnard raises the tone, you see, although working-class Anna herself wouldn’t have heard of the guy since, as we’re told, “It is very possible that my mother has never been inside a museum in her life.” But Gordon intones:

I’m afraid this whole book is like that passage: It reeks of writerly self-regard, showy intellectualism, and sentences of such fruity floatiness that it’s almost embarrassing to read them. In one passage, for instance, Gordon describes dining at the house of a hated aunt and weeping angrily in the car on the way home. Her husband (who, interestingly, thinks her tears are a put-on) urges her to get over childhood resentments.

“After this, I write less and less poetry,” she tells us. “I feel called to story now; I rename my vocation in this way.” Called to story? Yeesh. At another point, grad student Gordon is miffed to learn from her mother that a dead librarian, whose books she has been bequeathed, once had complicated financial dealings with Gordon’s father.

“The next morning my mother forgot that she had told me the story. But it had tainted the books, and so I left them in the garage, not unpacking them for years, until I too was married, housed, and tamed.”

Everything and everyone brings Gordon circling back not to Anna, but to herself. The chapter titled “My Mother and My Father,” for instance, asks: “What did they make of each other at first meeting? What did he make of her? What did she make of him? What they made was–me.” A few pages on, she describes going as a child with her parents to visit other people and observes, without irony: “Occasionally, I would be asked to sing or to recite a poem, and I understood very well that my successful performance made my parents feel that everything in their lives was worthwhile.”

Recounting her memories of her mother’s close friend Jane, Gordon is unable to construe a basis for their lifelong relationship that does not involve her own fascinating self.

At another point, Gordon beholds a formal portrait of Anna and her sisters: “As I look at the photograph, the five of them seem to beg for allegory; they are yearning to be made, at my hands, into types.” Can’t you just hear them? “Mary, it wasn’t enough being real women with actual interior lives. Please, oh please, won’t you make us into allegories?”

Gordon’s solipsistic lack of sympathy, her seeming inability to visit, even briefly, the interior lives of others, is somehow surprising in a novelist. Here, for example, Gordon describes visiting another of her mother’s good friends, a sweet woman named Peggy, who lost a son in a car accident:

It’s hard to know where to start with such a monstrous sentence; perhaps the tasteless juxtaposition of a dead youth with the “imprint of buttocks”? Or the suggestion that there’s something suspect about Peggy continuing to mourn her dead boy “even though” Gordon was only three when he died?

The casual arrogance is as heartbreaking as it is galling. And that’s just the callousness that comes in passing. When Gordon attacks explicitly, she does so with adolescent relish. Her aunt Rita is “selfish” and “murderous,” her grandmother is “austere, judging, cold,” her mother’s body in old age is “rotting” and “leprous,” now in death she is a “skeleton, or ash.”

Page after page shows Gordon despising, hating, punishing, cutting people off, never forgiving, savoring bitterness. That some of her loathed family members suffered dreadfully in their own lives–disease, paralysis, abuse–seems to give the author not a moment’s pause in putting the worst possible construction on all they ever said or did relating to her mother and her. And she throws in gratuitous ugliness, such as the “long, snakelike, single turd” she saw in a French lavatory after taking Anna to Chartres Cathedral.

The sordidness of Gordon’s account is perhaps best understood by comparison with another memoir that, like hers, begins at the bedside of the author’s senile mother.

Twenty-five years ago, Russell Baker began his book, Growing Up, with the admission that he had found his -mother’s life uninteresting, and was chagrined to realize that his own children now felt the same way about his.

Far from leading him to gaze into Narcissus’ pool, this insight gave Baker humility, and a new tenderness towards his family (and, for his memoir, a Pulitzer Prize).

No such humane proportion appears in Circling My Mother. Just before Anna turns 90, Mary Gordon returns to her bedside after a month of traveling to find that “my mother has erased me from the book of the living. She is denying the significance of my birth.” Like Baker’s aged mother, Gordon’s has also forgotten that she has a child at all.

“So much has happened to me in my life,” Anna tells her daughter. “You can’t expect me to remember everything.” It is one of the only droll bits, though unintentional, in this self-admiring pottage of Baby Boomer awfulness.

Meghan Cox Gurdon is a writer in Washington.