She has cited James Joyce’sDubliners (1914), Simone Weil’s Attente de Dieu (1950; Waiting for God, 1951), and the novels of Virginia Woolf, Margaret Drabble, and J. F. Powers as major influences on her fiction. Among Catholic writers, she especially admires Georges Bernanos, the author of Journal d’un cure de campagne (1936; Diary of a Country Priest, 1937), which she considers the greatest of all religious novels.

From Final Payments to Pearl, Gordon’s literary technique has become increasingly complex and experimental, especially in her approach to structure and point of view. Her outlook on life broadens, deepens, and darkens. The fact that life is chancy and perplexing becomes successively more apparent in her fiction. While her characters’ futures appear less and less promising, those individuals nevertheless remain affirmative of human life on earth, as does their author. In the course of Gordon’s novels, the world of organized religion becomes less and less central, but the author’s religious perspective becomes more subtly implicit.

Mary Catherine Gordon was born in 1948 in Far Rockaway, New York, to a working-class, Irish Catholic family. Her father was an important early influence in her life, teaching her to read and encouraging her to write. She was only seven when he died, leaving her devastated. She thus grew up in a female household inhabited by her mother, an aunt, and her grandmother. The latter two were rigid in their piety and unsympathetic toward Gordon’s literary interests. Gordon attended parochial school and originally planned to become a nun.

Her rebellious nature began to manifest itself during her high school years, and she chose to attend Barnard College instead of Catholic Fordham University. During her university years in the 1960’s, she was exhilarated by the sense of freedom and experimentation on campus. Antiwar demonstrations, the women’s movement, and the life of the counterculture caused her to question Catholicism’s stance on sex and on the role of women in the church. After college she began graduate work at Syracuse University and participated in a women’s writers’ group. She began to publish poems and short stories while working on a dissertation on Virginia Woolf. When her third novel was published, she gave up her graduate work.

When Gordon began researching a biography of her father, she was forced to see that most of what he had claimed about himself was untrue. He had come from an immigrant Jewish family and had converted to Roman Catholicism; he had never attended Harvard University or lived in Paris; his writing was labored and pretentious, bigoted and anti-Semitic. These discoveries were painful for Gordon but confronting them marked a new direction in her writing. Gordon married and settled with her husband and children in New York City, teaching creative writing at Barnard College.

Mary Catherine Gordon was born on December 8, 1949, to David and Anna Gagliano Gordon. As Gordon says in The Shadow Man, the death of her father when she was seven years old was the most influential event of her life. A convert to an extreme right-wing Catholicism from Judaism, David Gordon had idolized, and been idolized by, his young daughter. “I love you more than God,” he told her once, frightening the child with the ambiguity and the cosmic implications of that statement. He regaled her with tales of his days at Harvard and his experiences in Oxford and in Paris with other American expatriates, taught her to read at the age of three, and instructed her in French, German, and Latin. Gordon left his daughter with a paradoxical legacy of lies and a deep intellectual curiosity. Only as an adult, in researching The Shadow Man, did Gordon learn the truth about her father: that he was a naturalized American citizen born in Lithuania, not Lorain, Ohio; and that his claim that he attended Harvard and Oxford universities was false—he had never attended college. Although she knew that he had published soft-core pornography as well as poetry and critical analyses of other writers in publications such as The New Republic, Gordon did not realize how rabidly anti-Semitic he was until she began her research. In discovering the truth about her father, Gordon was able to separate herself from his influence and accept his loss.

Although Gordon attributes her vocation as a writer to the encouragement of her father, she also credits her mother’s side of the family for supplying the rhythms and inflections of her style and the concerns that shape her work. Anna Gordon, who had polio at the age of three and was disabled as a result, worked as a legal secretary to support herself and her daughter after David Gordon’s death. She was an excellent letter writer. Anna’s Irish Sicilian family members also served as models for many of the characters in Gordon’s novels, often to their great displeasure. In Circling My Mother, Gordon describes their deeply conflicted relationship; she gained a new understanding of and compassion toward her mother through writing Anna Gordon’s story.

Almost as influential on Gordon’s life as the death of her father was her decision to turn down a scholarship to Fordham University, a Catholic school, and instead attend Barnard College. In a 1994 interview with Patrick H. Samway, Gordon claimed that her reasons for wanting to attend Barnard were totally shallow; she had read novelist J. D. Salinger and wanted to meet a Seymour Glass. Once she enrolled at Barnard, where she was taught by essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, her life changed. She received her B.A. from Barnard in 1971 and her M.A. from Syracuse University in 1973. A brief marriage in 1974 ended in divorce. From 1974 until 1978 Gordon taught at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, New York. In 1979 she taught at Amherst College and married Arthur Cash, a professor of English in the State University of New York system. They had two children, Anna and David. Since 1988, Gordon has been Millicent McIntosh Professor of Writing at Barnard College in New York City.

Although she has frequently been labeled a Catholic writer, Gordon rejects this definition as far too narrow for the scope of her literary work. Raised as a Catholic, she left the Church for several years but later returned. She reveres Catholicism for its spirituality but criticizes the Church’s hierarchy for its dogmatism, especially the refusal to allow women a role equal to that of men in the Church. As a student, Gordon was involved in antiwar and feminist protests, and she continues to be a political activist. She places high value on her work as a teacher and is greatly respected by her students.