SOURCE: Gordon, Mary, and Patti Doten. “The Voices Inside Mary Gordon: In In Rest of Life, Her Muses Move Her to Write About the Sexes.” Boston Globe (4 October 1993): 30.

[In the following interview, Gordon comments on the theme of gender relations in The Rest of Life.]

Authors have always talked about the source of their creative fire—dreams and nightmares, a traumatic childhood, voices echoing from behind the arras. But Mary Gordon, author of the critically acclaimed Final Payments and The Company of Women, makes the source of her considerable vision sound so simple, so homey.

“I get a feeling that someone's living in the house,” said Gordon, who was in Boston to publicize her latest book, The Rest of Life. “I've no idea how they moved in. I begin to hear their voices. I listen closely so I can find the language that will make them visible and audible to others.”

After months and sometimes years, these house guests pack up and leave as abruptly as they arrived. “I know when they move out,” said Gordon, smiling, “because they stop talking.”

And her writing has come to an end. That is until the next round of guests.

The characters in the three novellas that make up her new book each spent a year with Gordon, following her from her Manhattan apartment to her weekend home in New Paltz, N. Y., and on to her August rental in Wellfleet.

They have been well served for their patience. For once again, Gordon dazzles with her style and her mind—one of the most intelligent, compassionate and witty at work in the literary world today.

But as one of the Ritz-Carlton waiters commented when Gordon slipped away to make a telephone call during a recent interview in the hotel, “she doesn't look like a genius.” Whatever genius is supposed to look like—Gordon, 44, with her short-cropped hair, unassuming air and roomy clothes ordered from the Victoria's Secret catalog (the back section—past all the youthful breasts and thighs), looks like your typical middle-class suburban neighbor who loves her two kids, her second husband, the family black Labrador, Cape Cod and New York City.

In her previous novels, Gordon's heroines were concerned with the mysteries of faith and the perils and comforts of family life. In The Rest of Life, she focuses on the complicated, contradictory and paradoxical relationships between the sexes.

“I wanted to write about sex as a pleasurable experience for women,” said Gordon. “Throughout literature, female sexuality has always involved high drama and a tragic end. If a woman ends up having sex in a book, she is probably going to die. I wanted to write a story for contemporary women where sex is not high tragedy but pleasurable and imperfect.”

In “Immaculate Man,” Gordon explores what it would be like for a 48-year-old-woman with a full life and a sexual past to have a relationship with a male virgin, in this case a Catholic priest.

“I know a lot of women who are smart, open to life and have full lives but things with men just haven't worked out,” said Gordon. “There is a certain sadness that exists in these women, a loss of tone. I wanted to explore what it would be like if a woman got that tone back again.

“Plus, there's been so much written about female virginity, I wanted to explore a female perception of male innocence.”

The second novella, “Living at Home,” highlights the issues of mobility, fixedness and finding a safe place that is not constricting. Her lovers are a thrice-married female psychiatrist who works with autistic children and a journalist who is constantly racing to the world's trouble spots.

The final story, the title piece, takes an elderly woman back to Italy where she confronts a tragedy that has colored her entire adult life—a suicide pact made with her teen-age lover. At the last moment she chose life. He did not. It is a complicated journey into memory, secrecy and guilt.

The last being something Gordon had to work through after 12 years in Catholic schools and as the only daughter of deeply devout parents.

“I have a relentless urge to look at everything in ethical terms and perhaps that makes me feel more guilty than others,” said Gordon. “My daughter,” Anna, 13, “is without guilt but my son,” David, 9, “is not. I worry about him because he can get himself tied up in knots about whether he has been good or not. Like all writers I have my demons but I am not constantly tormented.”

Gordon said she was in step with her parents' faith until the hormones of adolescence coursed through her veins.

“We were always being told that sex was awful but it didn't seem awful to me,” said Gordon. “I wanted it. And if the church could be so wrong about sex, I thought they must be wrong about other things as well. It's too bad that the good things about the church get buried in an acrid fog of sexual hysteria.”

Gordon is raising her children in the church but doesn't want Catholicism to be what she experienced—the pressure that shaped everything in her life.

Although Gordon chooses to get up at 5:30 to spend an hour reading and thinking before waking her children, she feels constantly fatigued and that her life is unbalanced.

“After the kids leave for school at 8:45, I'm usually in need of some mind-altering drugs,” she said with a laugh.

She writes weekdays until the children return from school but does not write the two days she teaches creative writing and modern literature at her alma mater, Barnard College. Her favorite writers include Katherine Anne Porter, Ford Maddox Ford and Judy Wolf.

What about John Updike?

“I hate him,” she said, a comment that startles coming from this soft-spoken, mild mannered woman. “I hate his attitude toward women. I find it revolting. His writing is enormously sentimental and brutal at the same time. And he chronically overwrites.

“Cheever can be forgiven because he writes with such beautiful style. Updike's style is not good enough to overcome his misogyny.”

Gordon said she can never write when the children are in the house. “If I hear them breathing, that's it,” said Gordon.

During the week, she and the kids are in Manhattan and her husband, Arthur Cash, remains in New Paltz where he is a professor of 18th-century English literature at the state university. They all spend weekends in the upper New York state university town.

“This is my fourth year in the city,” said Gordon, “and I'm loving it. I'm a city person, a New Yorker. It's in my blood. I like being on the streets and having my children grow up knowing that most of the world doesn't look like them. And I feel fortunate to be able to send them to private schools where they're getting an education that's not available outside the city.”

She said she met her husband of 14 years, a man with “an enormous sweetness about him who has some of the benign qualities of the absent-minded professor,” through her first husband. They were teaching colleagues and still are.

“We were a scandal for a while,” said Gordon. “We were the first to have an affair in that small academic community.”

Gordon is presently at work on her first book of nonfiction, a book about her father who died at age 57 when Gordon was 7.

“My father was an intellectual, my mother who is 85 and in a nursing home more simple,” said Gordon. “I was very close to my father. But there are things about my father I don't like. Things I have to confront and accept.

“He was very right wing,” said Gordon. “He was a Jew who converted to Catholicism. He was very anti-Semitic.”

She is almost halfway through the book but recently has been distracted by someone new moving into her house.

“I find myself writing little sketches about this woman,” said Gordon. “She's a mother who was a politically free spirit during the '60s. She's got a daughter in her '20s who goes on a hunger strike in Ireland believing that this will please the mother. Well, the mother is appalled.

“Depending on how forceful this voice becomes, I may just have to set my father aside and go ahead and do this book.”