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Circling My Mother
By Mary Gordon
Pantheon, 254 pp., $24

In more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction over three decades, Mary Gordon has plumbed the same themes of grace and despair: the promise and imprisonment of Catholicism, the thick inexorability of family, the life of the mind wafting, sometimes fruitlessly, above the grittier demands of the real world. The world depicted belongs to the working-class, Irish-American Catholicism of the mid-20th century, a close-knit milieu as burdened by repression as it was tethered by hope. The sine qua non of yearning throughout Gordon's work is surpassed only by the certainty of loss -- of those whom one loves, of that which is already long gone. In her 1996 memoir, "The Shadow Man," she gave us the true story behind so much of the thematic sensibility: Her beloved father, who died when she was 7, was a dreamer and an impostor, a Jew who converted to Catholicism, a mix of lies, fantasies, and half-hearted talents. But the adoration of the child had already made its signature rings inside the tree.

"Circling My Mother" is the maternal coeval to "The Shadow Man," coming as it does a few years after Gordon's mother's death, at 94 -- after years of misery, alcoholism, and dementia, her last light on earth more a haze of sadness than one of any color. But before she succumbed to the sorrows and afflictions of her long life, Anna Gagliano Gordon was a woman who worked most of her life as a secretary, the breadwinner for her own large family of origin. The daughter of Irish and Italian Catholics, she spent most of her life in Queens, N.Y. Her daughter, an only child, was born when she was 41; she worked for another 30 years. "If someone wanted to paint a portrait of my mother," writes Gordon near the end of the story, "he would have been wise to paint her at her desk. Where she was happiest. Where she was most at home."

Every mother-daughter relationship invites complexity, particularly when scrutinized with the contemplative skills of a writer, but Gordon's portrait possesses a particularly tormented ambivalence (which she concedes from the start). There are images of the painter Bonnard, full of light and color, juxtaposed against the cruel disrepair of her mother's body, broken by polio when she was young, then battered by the ravages of age. And the scent of her perfume, Arpege, which could cause Mary the child or adult to swoon with pleasure and memory, its triggers the antithesis to the smells of Anna's decline. With her left leg shorter by 6 inches, confined to an orthopedic boot and eventually leg braces, she struggled for years to climb the stairs to the law office where she worked -- struggled, too, to accompany her daughter to the movie theater, which had a staircase she approached "like a horse wondering whether or not to take a fence." And yet such stoic nobility could disappear during one of her alcoholic rages, when she would lash out with bitter invective against the sisters who betrayed her, the husband who died, the daughter who could only disappoint. Mary, yoked to her mother through love and obligation and the rage-filled attachment of never-enough, was the one who cared for her mother, got her home, cleaned up the mess.

"Circling My Mother" is a curious work -- both wrenching and enlivening, resonant with candid emotion and yet sometimes episodic. Mistrustful of her ability to portray her mother straight on (hence the title), Gordon has arranged the narrative in contextual chapters: her mother and her sisters, her mother's friends, her mother's body. The result can be frustratingly out of synch chronologically, especially if the reader is not familiar with Gordon's family history through "The Shadow Man." Whether because of structure or oversight, crucial details emerge halfway through or appear parenthetically -- the father's conversion and his consistent business disasters, Mary missing her father's funeral because of chicken pox. Perhaps most important, we are near the end of the book before we begin to understand the extent of Anna's physical disability and its effect upon her daughter's psyche.

Some of this is no doubt owing to Gordon's own "circling"; her concentric route toward knowing and claiming her mother is, by structural necessity, a nonlinear affair. And we are treated along the way to some horrid or touching family stories, many of which have surfaced, in altered garb, in Gordon's fiction over the years: a clan of selfish Cinderella sisters, one of whom stole the flowers off another sister's grave; priests who serve as stand-in husbands for the devoted unmarried women of Anna's generation; the continual family efforts to diminish the child -- Mary -- who possessed the startling vocabulary and flights of fancy that would take her up and away. Throughout the memoir are classic themes of sublimation: her belief in beauty and poetry over the moral reckoning of the church; her sense, upon her father's death, that "it will be one of the important jobs of my life to honor mourning." And the understated legacy that all the women of Anna's life left her with: aunts crazy and cruel, or eccentric and delightful (one whose house offered chocolate stars and high heels and the luxuries of pleasure); friends who defined a world beyond men, whether husbands or holy fathers.

There are tremendously sad parts of Anna's story, the failures of any life writ large by alcoholism and decline, and Gordon's ambivalence about her mother -- wrought in part by the tangles of their attachment -- appears sometimes in a lexicon of shame: "cripple," "spinster," other descriptors that seem as fear-based as they are pejorative. And yet two images of this revelatory memoir last beyond its anguish. The first is of Anna proudly attending to her desk at the office, touching the typewriter and piles of carbon paper that gave her life meaning. The second is of Mary the adult visiting her mother in a nursing home -- bringing her cake, and singing to her, long after Anna has forgotten her daughter's name. Such are the memories that allow air and light into a room of so much heartache.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.