Conversations With Mary Gordon

by Gordon, Mary; Bennett, Alma

• ISBN13: 9781578064472
• ISBN10: 1578064473
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-04-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi

Summary

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 Smart 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 shediscovered 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

Author Biography

Alma Bennett is an associate professor of humanities and English and director of the M.A. in English program at Clemson University

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Chronology	xvii
Talking with Mary Gordon	1	(3)
Edmund White
A Young Author Probes Old Themes	4	(4)
Nan Robertson
An Interview with Mary Gordon	8	(9)
Diana Cooper-Clark
Mary Gordon Barbara	17	(3)
A. Bannon
A Talk with Mary Gordon	20	(6)
Le Anne Schreiber
Moral Aerobrics	26	(4)
Susan Bolotin
Margaret Drabble and Mary Gordon: Writers Talk Ideas of Our Time	30	(10)
Margaret Drabble
Mary Gordon
Lynn Neary Talks with Mary Gordon	40	(2)
Lynn Neary
Mary Gordon	42	(15)
Annie Lally Milhaven
Radical Damage: An Interview with Mary Gordon	57	(14)
M. Deiter Keyishian
Susan Stamberg Talks with Mary Gordon	71	(2)
Susan Stamberg
A Conversation Between Tom Smith and Mary Gordon	73	(8)
Tom Smith
Mary Gordon	81	(9)
Eleanor Wachtel
Mary Gordon	90	(7)
Terry Gross
An Interview with Mary Gordon	97	(7)
Patrick H. Samway
Conversations with Mary Gordon	104	(33)
Alma Bennett
The Writing Life: Madison Smartt Bell Hosts Mary Gordon	137	(9)
Madison Smartt Bell
Mary Gordon	146	(12)
Terry Gross
Mary Gordon: The Shadow Man	158	(6)
Charlie Rose
Sandy Asirvatham: An Interview with Mary Gordon	164	(10)
Sandy Asirvatham
Mary Gordon	174	(7)
Terry Gross
Author Mary Gordon Says She Wanted to be Celebratory	181	(8)
Charlie Rose
Mary Gordon: The Art of Teaching and Writing	189	(4)
Amy Callahan
Hidden at the Heart of the House	193	(4)
William L. Hamilton
A Sense of Place: Looking Into the Life of Mary Gordon	197	(4)
Alden Mudge
Index	201