Mama Dearest

...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...

...What did he make of her...

...I know they were important to each other, but I have no idea what the flavor of that importance might have been...

...Please, oh please, won't you make us into allegories...

...No such humane proportion appears in Circling My Mother...

...We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long ago, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud...

...She was disfigured by polio when she was three...

...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: Even though the older one died when I was three, he loomed in Peggy's mind, and in the apartment where I visited her, where his photo dominated the piano with its hard, unforgiving stool that seemed to have the imprint of buttocks on it, lightening the wood and giving the illusion of a softness that had no basis in the physical world...

...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...

...Gordon begins by posing questions—a rhetorical affectation that persists throughout...

...I don't like to think that Jane was interested in my mother because she was my mother, that it was not my mother's company she craved but mine...

...She is denying the significance of my birth...

...Or perhaps I invoke Bonnard simply to allow myself a companion on the journey...

...The chapter titled "My Mother and My Father," for instance, asks: "What did they make of each other at first meeting...

...Everything and everyone brings Gordon circling back not to Anna, but to herself...

...It is one of the only droll bits, though unintentional, in this self-admiring pottage of Baby Boomer awfulness...

...To have the companion of a great painter on this writer's journey, this writer's task: trying to understand in the only way a writer can—by writing...

...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...

...Yeesh...

...The author isn't sure...

...by Meghan Cox Gurdon It has become fashionable for memoirs to be scorchingly honest, and for authors to spare no ugly detail in recounting events and personalities that shaped 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...

...When I try to remember conversations my mother might have had with Jane, or to imagine what they might have done when I wasn't there, I draw a blank...

...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...

...I rename my vocation in this way...

...Mary, it wasn't enough being real women with actual interior lives...

...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...

...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...

...What does this mean about their friendship...

...It is like spending the evening with a vampire...

...Called to story...

...The next morning my mother forgot that she had told me the story...

...they are yearning to be made, at my hands, into types...

...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...

...Page after page shows Gordon despising, hating, punishing, cutting people off, never forgiving, savoring bitterness...

...she asks of the work she has just published...

...What they made was—me...

...What would a book like this be called...

...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...

...When Gordon attacks explicitly, she does so with adolescent relish...

...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...

...Can't you just hear them...

...Anna had four sisters, each more difficult than the one before...

...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...

...After this, I write less and less poetry," she tells us...

...she married only in midlife, gave birth to Mary Catherine, lost her husband to a heart attack, and eventually ran disastrously to drink...

...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...

...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...

...Of making something of my mother...

...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...

...You can't expect me to remember everything...

...And yet we begin, and we begin again, because it is the thing we do...

...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...

...So much has happened to me in my life," Anna tells her daughter...

...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...

...Memoir...

...I feel called to story now...

...A job that is never completed, and never anything but a failed attempt...

...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...

...These hopeless, end-of-the-line visits with my mother made me wish I had not thrown off my own past so carelessly...

...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...

...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...

...Her husband (who, interestingly, thinks her tears are a put-on) urges her to get over childhood resentments...

...people from whom you come in the cruelest possible light...

...Gordon's solipsistic lack of sympathy, her seeming inability to visit, even briefly, the interior lives of others, is somehow surprising in a novelist...

...And that's just the callousness that comes in passing...

...But Gordon intones: I am involved in a job of making...

...The casual arrogance is as heartbreaking as it is galling...

...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...

...In the Age of Oprah, if you don't have a genuinely moving personal saga (e.g., Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel or Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes) or a horror story (say, Augusten Burroughs's Running with Scissors), then you are left with little choice, it seems, but to dig out the family dark bits and cast the Meghan Cox Gurdon is a writer in Washington...

...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...

...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...

...What did she make of him...

...Like Baker's aged mother, Gordon's has also forgotten that she has a child at all...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Biography...