Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity [Paperback]

Mary Gordon, bestselling author ofSpendingandThe 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. Wise, humorous, and intelligent,Seeing Through Placesilluminates the relationship between the physical, emotional, and intellectual architectures of our lives, showing us the far-reaching power that places ultimately have in influencing a life.Mary Gordonis the author ofSpending, The Company of Women, The Rest of Life,andThe Shadow Man.Winner of the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1997 O. Henry Prize for best short story, she teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.Chapter One: My Grandmother's House

Some days I would be left at my grandmother's house. I never knew why. Usually, I could ask my father anything, but I couldn't ask him that, why I was being left at my grandmother's, because I knew it was a privilege to be in that house, and no one, even my father would understand my reluctance. It was only a partial reluctance anyway, and I believed then that I had no business communicating anything I only partially understood.

Entering the house, I was plunged into an atmosphere of bafflement. The words, the manners, all the things, were foreign to me. The foreignness almost seemed literal; often I didn't understand what the people in my grandmother's house were saying, and often what I said was not understood.

What do I mean by understand? There were names for things that I found unfamiliar: commode for toilet, box for the area of the floor where the dog was made to lie, pantry for a series of shlÉ