Story Circle Network

Austin Chapter
Reader's Guide

July 2003

Seeing Through Places: Reflection on Geography & Identity
by Mary Gordon

Mary Gordon, bestselling author of Spending and The Shadow Man, investigates the role that place plays in the formation of identity -- the connections between how we experience place and how we become ourselves. From her grandmother's house, which stood at the center of her childhood life, to a rented house on Cape Cod, where she began to mature as a writer, Mary Gordon navigates the reader through these spaces and worlds with subtlety and style...

If you'd like to read notes from an interview with Mary Gordon, author of Seeing Through Places, go here: www.bookpage.com/0001bp/mary_gordon.html.

  1. What did you find most rewarding about this book? most challenging? least rewarding?

  2. In this "memoir of spaces," Gordon writes about the places that shaped her perceptions and her identity. Her grandmother's house seems to have played the most important role. How did it shape the little girl? The adult Mary notes (p. 47) that the "house made people act strangely, made them come to decisions that could never be explained....It was a house of punishment." Do you agree with this belief? Or do you think that the people's strange behaviors made the house strange?

  3. Have you ever lived in or visited a house that seemed "strange"? What was your experience there? Did it shape your life in any important way?

  4. Gordon's "play corner" was in her father's study. What was their relationship like? What was your "play corner" when you were a child? What did it say about your relationships with parents and/or siblings?

  5. Gordon sometimes withholds pieces of information that might help the reader to make sense of the child's experience. For example, it isn't until page 80 (in "Places to Play") that we learn her parents' ages. If this information had come earlier, would it have changed the way you read the first section? Also, she sometimes repeats parts of her story: for example, her grandmother's death. How do you feel about this "layered" way of telling a story?

  6. Gordon loved a house on Cape Cod, in part because of the natural beauty of the setting and in part because she wrote "happily and well" there. But she could not afford to buy it. Have you ever loved a house and then lost it? How did that feel? Do you think that Gordon conveyed that feeling?

  7. Reread the last paragraph of p. 205, and the last three paragraphs on p. 228. Have you ever felt like this? When, where, why?

  8. Gordon subtitles the book "Reflections on Geography and Identity." Do you think "geography" is the right word? What word would you substitute?

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