In her debut volume, essayist Gordon presents an uneven chronicle of her growth through therapy from a ``sullen, disorganized daughter'' to a woman who sees her ``marriage and family as a garden to cultivate.''
Dividing her memoir into eight sections, Gordon begins with an account of a year she spent (while a teen) at a hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Her first therapist becomes ``inappropriately attached'' to her and makes a clumsy sexual overture, which Gordon rejects. The subsequent section returns to her childhood—the strongest portion of the book, with its many striking anecdotes and lovely images. She recalls, for example, a birthday bath when her mother floated candles ``anchored in halved walnut shells,'' then ``turned off the lights, lit the candles and stood smoking a cigarette in a shadowy corner of the bathroom'' while Gordon ``sat in the midst of a small shining armada.'' From here on, the volume moves more or less chronologically through her various crises (alcohol, sexual promiscuity, abortion, rape), attachments, therapists, epiphanies, failures, and eventual middle age ``calm.'' Consuming much of the text is the author’s analysis of her long therapeutic relationship with Dr. Leslie Farber (she followed him from Massachusetts to New York), whose unconventional strategies will raise readers’ eyebrows (Gordon became for a time a virtual member of Farber’s family). Along the way, she assails a number of people and institutions: her father ``browbeat'' her ``unmercifully'' and had a ``boobish lack of interiority''; her mother displayed a ``fey charm'' and was ``calculated and manipulative''; the unnamed university in New England where Gordon earned two academic degrees was a ``fifth rate'' place with ``timid and sleepy'' teaching. She also makes sure readers know that despite her problems she has always been ``bright''—a trait she does not neglect to mention in just about every section.
At times darkly self indulgent, yet lit in its most powerful moments with language truly luminous. (Radio satellite tour)
