Seeing Through Places
Reflections on Geography and Identity
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Mary Gordon, bestselling author of Spending and The Shadow Man, investigates the role that place plays in the formation of identity -- the connections between how we experience place and how we become ourselves. From her grandmother's house, which stood at the center of her childhood life, to a rented house on Cape Cod, where she began to mature as a writer, Mary Gordon navigates the reader through these spaces and worlds with subtlety and style. Wise, humorous, and intelligent, Seeing Through Places illuminates the relationship between the physical, emotional, and intellectual architectures of our lives, showing us the far-reaching power that places ultimately have in influencing a life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Composed of eight loosely connected essays about places that have marked Gordon's (Spending) life, this beautifully written but uneven memoir evokes above all the intensely sensual and emotional perceptions of childhood. Proceeding from a brilliant New Yorker essay ("My Grandmother's House") about a childhood dominated and emblematized by a powerful and mysterious matriarch and her old-fashioned house, Gordon tracks her progress outward to the grand Manhattan spaces that were her refuge as a student at Barnard, to a beloved writer's retreat on Cape Cod, then to her return to the apartment of her girlhood dreams as a Barnard professor. Not surprisingly, the writing anchored in childhood is the strongest; there, Gordon conveys a sadness and solitude that is a kind of fertile darkness. Nurtured by her Catholic- and Hollywood-themed fantasies, "trying to construct a world of lightness," she nonetheless practiced a ruthless honesty that, she notes, serves her well as a writer. The child of a gentle failure, a writer of unpublishable pieces, and of a proud, polio-crippled working mother, Gordon was forced to move in with her grandmother after the death of her father. There, she marinated in the shadows, seeing but seemingly unseen, making observations shot through with longing and wit. An immaculate young priest entered the darkly feminine house, making the girl feel "a lightening of the atmosphere that made me think there was some hope for my future life." The later essays are often sketchy and self-indulgent, as when she ruminates about her good fortune in landing again at Barnard. At her best here, however, Gordon shows us the creative power of remembering.
