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  • Some Way Out of Here
  • Carolyn Steedman (bio)
Mary Gordon. Circling My Mother. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007. x + 254 pp. ISBN 0-375-42456-4 (pb).

The invitation to write about this book arrived in September 2007, and the book itself from its Atlantic crossing (it was not then available in the United Kingdom) at the beginning of a new university term. It was the most generous and indulgent invitation of this kind that I have ever received: not so much a review, said the editors, but more of a rumination or a riff on mothers, daughters, feminism, biography . . . whatever I saw fit. (Who could refuse that? Not I, for sure.) At the time, I was teaching a course on the history of self-writing and self-representation, and in the week or so waiting for Circling My Mother, I indulged many a pedagogic fantasy about making my writing about an autobiography an autobiographical act that could be discussed in seminars. Perhaps they could read the review-in-progress and comment on it? And thereby understand some of the aetiology of all the self-writing and commentary on it that I was making them read? (But then they would need to read the book itself, which was clearly not possible as I was to be the likely possessor of the only copy in England.) And I rapidly discovered how difficult they found reading anything I had written as course material. I would never draw their attention to Landscape for a Good Woman, and I doubt they will discover it; but I have set one or two minor pieces of mine, as being the most efficient route to knowledge and information (I am meant to know about this stuff, after all!), thus fostering, it turned out, embarrassment rather than enlightenment. As a friend from another department said, by putting the author in the same room as the teacher, I placed them in one of the most difficult social situations it was possible to imagine. But our teaching is meant to be research-led! I said defensively. Yes, Carolyn, that means research you’re doing, not research you’ve done. I abandoned my teaching-as-research fantasy.

This is a scholarship girl’s tale, says Mary Gordon, “an untold story of working-class children of the sixties” (26). Yearning for revolution, they worked waiting tables and behind bars to pay their college fees. It is a history of the Irish in America. (Gordon has written on this topic before in the novel The Other Side [1989]; most of her fiction explores the U.S. Catholic working class.) She says that Circling My Mother is many things. In a chapter on her terrible, censorious, ungiving aunts, their tongue flailing [End Page 167] the reader across the generations, she asks, “What kind of story is this? Is it about the price of immigration, the pressures of respectability, a mix of Irish and American puritanism, the price of dogma too strictly or rigorously applied? Or too little maternal love . . . ?” Whatever it is, she says, it is an old story: “there will not be a family of sisters like them again” (99). The author Mary McCarthy makes a cameo appearance. (Really! In the text and in life! She comes over for dinner at the author’s house.) McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) is made manifest when she raises her brandy glass, smiles the Catholic girl’s “sly, complicit . . . slice of purloined triumphalism,” and toasts the end of all the aunts everywhere. Let’s drink, she says, “‘to something gone for good’” (100).

In a minor key, Circling My Mother is a late flowering of the 1970s Mother-Daughter Romance: under the edicts of feminism, daughters were enjoined to rediscover their mothers as women, fall into each other’s arms, throw off the yoke of male domination, and go off traveling together—as indeed Gordon did in 1973, taking her mother on a trip to Ireland. I shall use this book in any teaching I ever have to do concerning twentieth-century working-class history. Did every working-class girl in the 1960s Western world spend “every Saturday, winter or summer . . . among brooms...

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