Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity Hardcover - 2000

From the publisher

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 ofRome, 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.