Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity - Softcover

Judith Thurman Mary Gordon takes risks, personal and literary, that are necessary if one's work is to flourish, deepen, and become masterful, as hers has. Seeing Through Places is a marvelously suggestive, accurate, and moving mirror of a time, an ethos, and a landscape.

Sheila Kohler San Francisco Chronicle Gordon evokes the lost objects of all our childhoods...[She] is capable of describing the complexity of the human heart with eloquence and intelligence.

Susan Salter Reynolds Los Angeles Times Book Review When a memoir is well told, rich with detail, as this one is, the things and people in it remain truly unique in the writer's memory; neater explanations would be fiction.

Rosemary Dinnage The New York Times Book Review Re-evoking the places and objects that were once so much darker and more fearful is a fine work of restoration. Gordon remembers objects as meticulously as a still-life painter....[She] knits them all together in a satisfying pattern.

Colleen Kelly Warren St. Louis Post-Dispatch Gordon writes with soul-searching honesty of the circumlocutional route she has traveled to get home.

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.