Dean's Lecture Series
Riding the Wave: Swimming Between Fiction and Nonfiction
By Pat Harrison
In a presentation on April 28, titled “Riding the Wave: Swimming Between Fiction and Nonfiction,” Mary Gordon RI ’04 delivered the final Dean’s Lecture of the academic year. She read excerpts from the three projects she worked on as a Radcliffe fellow: a piece about her mother, called “My Mother’s Bosses”; an essay about Flannery O’Connor, titled “Flannery’s Kiss”; and an excerpt from her novel Pearl, slated for publication in February 2005.
“I learned the word boss early. It must have been one of the first I heard from my mother’s lips,” Gordon read. “A simple word, a necessary one, like milk or bath or blanket or behave.” As a child, Gordon felt brushed by her mother’s importance as a legal secretary. “I did not envy other children who stayed home with their mothers,” she read. “Their lives had a warmth mine lacked, but it was a warmth without glamour, a glamour I absorbed because my mother left the house with me each morning dressed in a suit, perfumed, carrying a handbag that had money in it she had made.”
Gordon’s text about Flannery O’Connor also had a strong mother/daughter theme. Like O’Connor, Gordon’s mother was crippled, and both women had a gravity that Gordon feels she lacks. “When exactly did you become such a superficial person?” her mother asked once when she saw her leafing through a catalog of beautiful clothes. Gordon said she could imagine O’Connor, who never married and devoted herself to God and writing, asking her the same question.
Following her lecture, Gordon signed copies of her books at a reception in Agassiz House. The McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College at Columbia University, she is the author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction. “She has swum,” Dean Drew Gilpin Faust said in her introduction, “across genres with a consistent brilliance of language and perception and an urgency of personal and moral vision.”