'Final Payments'

Mary Gordon

"My father's funeral was full of priests," the novel opens, and at last thirty-year-old Isabel Moore';s eleven years of caring for her invalid and intensely religious Catholic father come to an end. She's free to live her own life, to find personal and sexual fulfillment— but first she has to free herself from the guilt crippling her spirit. Gordon wrote about reinventing herself in this first novel, which established her as one of America's pre-eminent novelists.