The Shadow Man - by Mary Gordon (Paperback)

About the Book

In "The Shadow Man", the bestselling author of "Final Payments" and "The Company of Women" elevates the memoir into an uncompromising and unforgettable art form as she seeks to learn the truth about her lost father. 20 photos.

Book Synopsis

"My father died when I was seven years old. I've always thought that was the most important thing anyone could know about me." The beloved, lost father - the Shadow Man: in this searing memoir, one of America's finest writers discovers the truth about the man whose romantic image defined her life. But who was David Gordon really? In Mary Gordon's memories of him, he was an erudite and charming man: an intellectual, a writer and publisher, a Harvard dropout and Jazz Age bohemian. But at midlife she began to question these loving memories and to go in search of the man whose presence - and absence - haunted her life. Unburying startling truths, Gordon discovers both a devoted, inventive, and loving father and a person desperate to cover up the underside of the immigrant's encounter with the American dream. As Gordon tracks her father - in the archives, in libraries, in the middle of America - she uncovers lies, despair, madness: a man who lied about many things, including his date and place of birth, his native language, his family, his education. A Jew born in the last years of the nineteenth century, he became a convert to Catholicism and to right-wing politics, a literary critic who was also a pornographer, and a vicious anti-Semite. As a realistic portrait of her father emerges, Mary Gordon reevaluates herself in the light of these painful discoveries about her heritage and past.

From the Back Cover

Mary Gordon's father died when she was seven. For a long time she was content to remember David Gordon as the man who had loved her 'more than God' and then vanished. In this book on of our finest novelists sets out to retrieve her father from the mausoleum of mourning. What she discovers--in libraries, archives, and her own memory--tests her credulity and her forgiveness.

About the Author

Mary Gordon is the author of seven novels, including Final Payments, Pearl, and The Love of My Youth; six works of nonfiction, including the memoirs The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother; and three collections of fic­tion, including The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She has received many other honors, includ­ing a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.