Clear-eyed memoir "Circling My Mother" examines a complex relationship

Mary Gordon is a brilliant writer in all senses of that word; a gifted craftsperson, original scholar, unflinching observer of self and others. "Circling My Mother" is her strongest work to date, but far from the easiest to read. It is a beautiful, terrible story.

There's no shortage of well-rendered, unblinking memoirs by writers who also capture their memories in novels or hint at them in other nonfiction works. Gail Godwin, Kathryn Harrison and Sherwin Nuland come to mind.

Yet Gordon remains in a class by herself. Hers is an astonishing range, from the steamy entertainment of "Spending," in which a middle-age painter creates her best work with a wealthy lover's help, to the original insights in "Joan of Arc," a nonfiction book that spawned intelligent commentary in both religious and secular circles.

Gordon regards religion — the effects and institutions of her childhood Roman Catholicism, especially — as something organic to her entire life, not a thing that can be compartmentalized. Her parents' lives were plagued by common familial troubles: internecine wars over money and duty, wounding lies, divorce and abandonment. Yet rarely are the roots of such woes examined so convincingly through the lens of inherited religion.

The book is intensely personal — and thus necessarily imperfect. Connections made to the French painter Pierre Bonnard, whose work inspired Gordon's approach to this book, don't quite come together. One senses they are more about the writer's needs than the reader's; a small price to pay for the overall work.

Gordon's book "Shadow Man" pondered her Jewish father's conversion to Catholicism and a life built on lies. Now in the intrepid portrait "Circling My Mother," Gordon remembers Anne Gagliano Gordon's myriad sacrifices, her humor and sometime harshness and her ragged decline into alcoholism and old age.

Gordon's ability to inhabit the past completely, while writing material sharply relevant today, remains keen, as when she preserves this nearly extinct generational phenomenon:

"There was a kind of unmarried woman who worshipped priests; it was, without doubt, a form of idolatry, of the species reserved by the female for the male. But was it harmful, this idolatry? ... At least it created a romance in lives that would have been otherwise entirely bereft of it."

Gordon reflects that two things would stun her mother today: first, the obsolescence of typewriters (Anne was a legal secretary). Second, that so many Americans routinely associate Catholic priests with sexual scandal. "You will say that I am naive, that many of these women served priests sexually. ... But what I believe is that, in place of the ordinary heterosexual narrative, there was an alternative one for these women and these priests, a story centering on the pride a woman took in being the kind of woman about whom a breath of scandal would never arise; what she treasured was the idea that she was the kind of woman that 'Father' could be himself around."

"Circling My Mother" is also the narrative of normal physical decline, difficult for any daughter, and more so for one with lifelong complicated feelings toward a disabled mother. With one leg six inches shorter than the other from childhood polio, Anne Gordon couldn't take a step without a special built-up boot. "A body that was a problem, always. Never a gift," writes her daughter.

Yet this outsider, this mother who struggled with every stair she tried to climb, whose body was "misshapen ... even grotesque" (as Gordon bluntly puts it), was an undeniably sexual being, whose troubled marriage was passionate until it disintegrated. Gordon's frank gratitude for this is beautifully illustrative of the complex relationship she chronicles:

"To have parents who were heedless, passionate — all the more admirable, lovable, rare, for their not being in their first youth — that is something to be proud of ... something replenishing, encouraging. Not everyone has been given that. Having denied me the ordinary gifts — security, consistency, a sense of safety, a normal childhood — having failed to provide, so to speak, meat and potatoes, they set my place with sweetmeats, piquant sauces: sugarplums, champagne, and caviar. Who is to say that I was not well served?"