Mary, Mary, quite contrary: interview with author Mary Gordon
The Jerusalem Post, February 27, 2009
Mary Gordon’s work has been hailed as a prism that refracts Irish-American life, offering the reader a complex, multicolored look at this group, but the author herself is difficult to situate on the spectrum of writers. While she has been praised as a resounding voice for the inner world of Roman Catholics, and her writing is born of an abiding spirituality that is bound to the Church, she has resisted the term “Catholic writer.”
James Carroll, in his New York Times review of Gordon’s Joan of Arc, called her a “quintessentially American writer.” But in a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post, Gordon shied away from this label, as well.
“American literature really links women with suffocation, strangulation and death,” she says. She cites bastions of the American literary guard – Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn and “even The Great Gatsby which seemed sympathetic to women” – as examples. “These male writers offered models for writing about women that were no use to me, that I knew to be wrong,” she explains.