Mary Gordon Books In Order

Final Payments

When Isabel Moore’s father dies, she finds herself, at the age of thirty, suddenly freed from eleven years of uninterrupted care for a helpless man. With all the patterns of her life suddenly rendered meaningless, she turns to childhood friends for support, gets a job, and becomes involved with two very different men. But just as her future begins to emerge, her past throws up a daunting challenge.

A moving story of self reinvention, Final Payments is a timeless exploration of the nature of friendship, desire, guilt, and love.

The Company Of Women

‘A superb, stunningly written novel.’ The Philadelphia Inquirer
Raised by five intensely religious women and a charismatic, controversial priest, sheltered from the secular world, Felicitas Maria Taylor is intelligent, charming, and desperate for a taste of ordinary happiness. More freedom than she has ever imagined awaits her at Columbia University in the 1960s. There, Felicitas falls in love with the worst man for her with shattering results. Now she must turn again to the company of the women who love her as she struggles to embrace the future without betraying the past.

Men and Angels

Anne Foster’s husband is in France. She has stayed behind in their small college town with her two young children whom she loves with an intensity that awes her to finish writing the catalogue for a major exhibition of the work of American Impressionist painter Caroline Watson. As she delves into Caroline’s life, Anne sees a side of ‘mother love’ she’d never fathomed. Meanwhile, Anne’s live in babysitter, Laura Post, is obsessed with a different kind of love. She sees herself as one of God’s chosen and believes she has been sent to ‘save’ Anne and her children, whether they want it or not…

The Other Side

Gordon’s strength and skill as a storyteller have never been more evident than in this extraordinary novel of passage and change, of immigration and displacement, and of the struggles os families to find a common ground among generations.

Spending

Monica Szabo, a middle aged, moderately successful painter, encounters B, a wealthy commodities broker who collects her work. B volunteers to be her muse, offering her everything that male artists have always had to produce great art: time, space, money, and sex.

Passionate, provocative, and highly engaging, Spending displays Gordon’s maverick feminism, her extraordinary wit, and her unique perspectives on art, money, men, sex and the desires of women.

Pearl

On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her twenty-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politics-nor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself?

Shaken by this mystery, Maria and her childhood friend and Pearl‘s surrogate father, Joseph Kasperman, both rush to Pearl‘s side. As Mary Gordon tells the story of the bonds among them, she takes us deep into the labyrinths of maternal love, religious faith, and Ireland’s tragic history. Pearl is a grand and emotionally daring novel of ideas, told with the tension of a thriller.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Love of My Youth

From the acclaimed author of Pearl and Final Payments comes a beautifully choreographed novel about first lovers meeting again after more than thirty years and reimmersing themselves in their shared past. Miranda and Adam, high school sweethearts now in their late fifties, arrive by chance at the same time in Rome, a city where they once spent a summer deeply in love, living together blissfully. At an awkward reunion, the two who parted in an atmosphere of passionate betrayal in the 1960s and haven t seen each other since are surprised to discover that they may have something to talk about. Both have their own guilt, their sense of who betrayed whom, and their long held interpretation of the events that caused them not to marry and to split apart into the lives they ve led since both are married to others, with grown children. For the few weeks they are in Rome, Adam suggests that they meet for daily walks and get to know each other again. Gradually, as they take in the pleasures of the city and the drama of its streets, they discover not only what matters to them now but also more about what happened to them long ago. Miranda and Adam are masterfully portrayed characters, intent upon understanding who they are in relation to who they were. A story about what first love means and how it is shattered, and the lessons old lovers may still have to share with each other many years later, The Love of My Youth is also a poignant look back at the hopes and dreams of a generation and what became of them.

The Rest of Life

Now in a trade paperback edition, these beautifully written, deceptively simple novellas introduce three women, each of whom tells the story of the lover who has most altered her life. In stunning prose, Mary Gordon examines the conflicting desires of the mind and the flesh and measures the power of the place in which love resides.

The Stories of Mary Gordon

The masterly stories of Mary Gordon return us to the pleasure of this writer’s craft and to her monumental talent as an observer of character and of the ever-fading American Dream. These pieces encompass the pre- and postwar Irish American family life she circles in the early Temporary Shelter series, as well as a wealth of new fiction that brings her contemporary characters into middle age; it is their turn to face bodily decline, mortality, and the more complex anxieties of modern life. Gordon captures the sharp scent of feelings as they shift, the shape of particular lives in their hope and incomprehensibility.

In ‘The Neighborhood,’ a seven-year-old who has lost her father finds birthday parties, with their noisy games and spun-sugar roses on fancy cakes, her greatest trial. ‘City Life’ explores the dark side of Manhattan apartment living. ‘Intertextuality’ proposes a dream meeting between Proust’s characters and the author’s aging grandmother. Throughout, Gordon’s surprising path to the center of a story is as much a part of the tale as the self-understanding her characters achieve in the process: ‘What were they all, any of them, feeling?’ one narrator ventures. ‘This was the sort of question no one in my family would ask. Feelings were for others: the weak, the idle. We were people who got on with things.’

With their powerful insights into how we make do, both socially and privately, these stories are a treasure of American fiction. Each is a joy to read and a chance to savor Gordon’s clear vision: her ability to reveal at every turn what we need and what we wish for, and her willingness, always, to address what comes of such precious wishes.

The Shadow Man

In The Shadow Man, the bestselling author of Final Payments and The Company of Women elevates the memoir into an uncompromising and unforgettable art form as she seeks to learn the truth about her lost father. 20 photos.

Joan of Arc

With the passion and grace that mark her bestselling novels of women and faith, Mary Gordon contemplates one of history’s earliest and most powerful female martyrsEternally fascinating, an enigma no less in our time than in her own, Joan of Arc has haunted Gordon’s consciousness since childhood. Who was this girl who came from nowhere, supported an equivocal cause, triumphed for a scant few months, failed as a soldier, vacillated about her vision, died in agony, was refused canonization for five hundred years, yet, ponders Gordon, ‘stands alone in our imagination for the single minded triumph of the she and it must be a she who feared nothing, knew herself right, and chosen of the Lord?’Joan of Arc penetrates the popular cultural icon to examine the vulnerability of a woman forced by her mission into the public world of men, from her first march at the head of the French soldiery at the age of seventeen to her capture by the British in 1430, from her vilification as a witch to the formidable legacy of her struggle. Only Gordon a storyteller the San Francisco Chronicle calls ‘scintillating’ could breathe life into a figure so ethereal, so puzzling, so human.

Seeing Through Places

This rich and revealing book, from the acclaimed, bestselling author of Spending and The Shadow Man, is part memoir, part study of the shaping of a writer’s voice. Using the example of her own life, Mary Gordon investigates the role that place plays in the formation of identity the connections between where we live and who we are, between how we experience place and how we become ourselves. With wisdom, humor, and intelligence, Gordon illuminates the relationship between the physical, emotional, and intellectual architectures of our lives. Each of the eight essays focuses on a different place or series of spaces from an era in Mary Gordon’s life: from her youth, growing up Catholic and on the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ to her present life as an accomplished author and teacher at Barnard College. Gordon writes of the spaces both architectural and emotional that were central to her childhood: her grandmother’s house, which stood at the center of life for the extended family and whose physical design helped Gordon understand her grandmother, her mother, and ultimately herself; her baby sitter’s house, where Gordon observed the domestic rituals of a family different from her own; and the mysterious house next door, which unlike her own space of ‘female habitation’ was largely defined by the lives of boys. Gordon also focuses on the significant influence of the more public locations she found when she grew up and wandered farther afield: the sacred spaces of the priests who were a kind of extended family to the Gordons; the alluring spaces of Barnard and the Upper West Side, which symbolized a life of intellect and affluence to which she aspired; and the city of Rome, where she began to mature as a writer. And she writes of one house that’s been central to her adulthood and writing a Cape Cod, Massachusetts, rental and the significance of borrowing someone else’s private space for her own introspections. In vibrant, poetic prose, Mary Gordon navigates readers through these worlds she has inhabited, at the same time revealing herself with subtlety and style. In this stunning collection of linked essays, we come to see how integral places are to the lessons we come to learn about family, work, religion, love, and loss and the far reaching power places ultimately have in influencing a life.

Conversations with Mary Gordon

In Conversations with Mary Gordon, Mary Gordon reveals her intellectual vigor, her freewheeling humor, and her strongly held opinions on issues ranging from sex to contemporary literature and gender theory. With candor, she details her departure from and eventual return to her Irish Catholic heritage. Since the resounding success of her first novel, Final Payments 1978, Gordon has been one of America’s most popular and controversial writers. She has published five novels, three novellas, two collections of essays, a short story collection, a memoir, a biography of Joan of Arc, and dozens of book reviews. Conversations with Mary Gordon joins the writer in talks with Terry Gross, Charlie Rose, Edmund White, Madison Smartt Bell, Patrick H. Samway, and others. Nine of these interviews have never before been published. Her many interviewers know her as a wonderful, gregarious, passionate, and articulate interviewee. This is surprising, considering that Gordon once insisted during an interview that ‘interviews are absolutely my idea of hell.’ The clarity and conviction evident in her writing are matched by the same qualities in her conversation. She explores her favorite novelists Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford and talks at length about how and why she uses Roman Catholicism as metaphor and symbol in her own writing. Freely discussing the autobiographic influences in her work, she is open about the huge influence of her father. David Gordon, a journalist and scholar, died when Mary was seven. Mary loved him dearly, and she discusses his influence on her life and writing, as well as her profound disillusionment with him when she discovered the self hatred and ultra conservatism of his writing. Her utter devotion to him in early interviews gives way to disillusionment, rejection, and, ultimately, acceptance. This collection allows the reader to trace the roots both literary and autobiographical of one of America’s most fiercely intelligent and thoughtful writers. Alma Bennett is an associate professor of humanities and English at Clemson University.

Circling My Mother

In this triumphant return to nonfiction after two critically acclaimed works of fiction, Mary Gordon gives us a rich, bittersweet memoir about her mother, their relationship and her role as daughter. 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.

Reading Jesus

In the introduction to this remarkable book, Mary Gordon is riding in a taxi as the driver listens to a religious broadcast, and she reflects that, though a lifelong Christian, she is at odds with many others who identify themselves as Christians. In an effort to understand whether or not she had invented a Jesus to fulfill my own wishes, she determined to read the Gospels as literature and to study Jesus as a character. What results is a vibrantly fresh and personal journey through the Gospels, as Gordon plumbs the mysteries surrounding one of history’s most central figures. In this impassioned and eye opening book, Gordon takes us through all the fundamental stories the Prodigal Son, the Temptation in the Desert, the parable of Lazarus, the Agony in the Garden pondering the intense strangeness of a deity in human form, the unresolved more ambiguities, the problem posed to her as an enlightened reader by the miracle of the Resurrection. What she rediscovers and reinterprets with her signature candor, intelligence, and straightforwardness is a rich store of overlapping, sometimes conflicting teachings that feel both familiar and tantalizingly elusive. It is this unsolvable conundrum that rests at the heart of Reading Jesus and with which Gordon keeps us in thrall on every page. From the Hardcover edition.