MARY GORDON

In her novels, Mary Gordon explores the intricacies and emotions of family life. She was 29 when her first book, ”Final Payments,” was published. It had taken three years to write. Since then she has written three more novels and had a collection of short stories published. Now 40, Gordon teaches at Barnard College and is married to writer Arthur Cash. Her own life, influenced by two religions and a strong father who died when she was a child, has been as rich and complex as the lives of those in her fiction. Gordon was in Chicago recently to promote her new novel, ”The Other Side” (Viking, $19.95), and talked with freelance writer Norma Libman about the critical events that shaped her life.

My father died when I was only 7 years old. It would have been sad for any child to lose a parent, but I had a particularly intense relationship with my father because he stayed at home and my mother worked. This was extremely odd because it just was not done in the early `50s.

My father was a Jew who converted to Catholicism, and he was an intellectual. He married my mother, a simple Irish working-class woman, because he had this romantic notion about Irish Catholicism and the simplicity of a sort of peasant life.

He was going to marry the woman who had not been corrupted by the modern age. He was going to marry into a world that was not corrupted by the modern age. On the other hand, he still wasn`t going to bring me up to be a peasant. So here I was, born into this working-class world (New York City). He taught me to read when I was 3, and started teaching me French when I was 5 and Latin when I was 6. He created a sort of world within a world for me, and then he died when I was 7.

I was the only person in the community who was partly Jewish. I was being trained to be an intellectual. And I was partially an orphan. I really think that taught me about marginality in a very important way, about not being at the center of the web, about being outside what`s going on.

It taught me about people`s pleasure in excluding someone who is different. It`s really very good for a writer. It`s not fun, but it really does give you some very valuable experience.

From the point at which my father converted, his family just pretended he was dead. So I never met them. I don`t know them at all, which is very sad. But he converted in 1938. That was not a good time to turn your back on your people, so I understand their position.

There`s a part of me that understands why they had to do that. My mother`s family only partially accepted my father. They thought he was totally bizarre. My grandmother only agreed to go to my parents` wedding at the last minute.

After he died I was really alone. I was kind of in a daze, in a limbo. I think I must have been very depressed. I was in a misery and I could never break out from it.

My real life at this time was reading and writing. I had that tremendous hunger to read that you have when you`re young, when people are screaming at you to go out and play, that you never have again.

My life changed again when I was 13. I met two new friends at school and we sort of invented each other. Here we were-these three smart girls in this not very good Catholic high school-and we would get little hints, picked up somewhere in the universe, of what you were supposed to read and what you were supposed to listen to and what you were supposed to look at.

We would sort of whisper forbidden names to each other like Sartre, Camus, Monet, Matisse, Beckett and talk about them guiltily. And we really enabled each other to be curious and independent-minded and different from a lot of the people we were living with.

All three of us decided that we wanted to attend Barnard College in New York. Nobody had ever gone to an Ivy League school from Mary Louis Academy in Queens. They didn`t want to send our transcripts and we really had to fight for it. They just didn`t want us to go.

We fought everybody. We were very courageous at 17. But we just knew we had to get out. It was like a hunger. We knew there was a wider world out there and we wanted to be let into it.

We were straining toward something and all the objections were nothing more than little flies buzzing around us.

So we all went to Barnard (a woman`s college in New York City associated with Columbia University). It was a wonderful place and a wonderful experience. Those were pretty heady times. We were there for the Columbia student riots and the beginnings of the feminist movement and all those years of protest.

We went from a very cloistered, convent-like existence to the `60s at Columbia. It was a big wrench. But we all did very well. My friend Kathy now is a professor of Medieval History at Notre Dame and my friend Maureen is a doctor at Children`s Hospital at Boston. We all survived and we stay in touch. After Barnard, I went to graduate school at Syracuse University

(Syracuse, N.Y.), in the writing program, and stayed on to do some doctoral work, `though I didn`t finish my Ph.D. Then I got married for the first time, in 1974, and that ended in divorce.

By the time I got divorced a couple of my cousins had been divorced. They were a lot straighter than I was so the aunts couldn`t be quite so mouthy about my divorce because their kids had done it first. I got married again in 1979.

I had started to write poetry when I was about 5 years old. My father always encouraged me. I wrote a book on the Trinity when I was 8. Gradually my poetry started getting more and more narrative and I began moving into short stories and then novels, when I was older.

It`s true that my father had taught me that books were important, music was important, painting was important, and these were good things to spend your life doing and caring about. But I tend to think I was destined to become a writer anyway, because I can`t imagine a self that is not a writer-self.

My mother was in no way an intellectual and I think she felt a bit humbled and nonplussed by this daughter who was so like her husband and so different from her.

But I think she recognized this and she sort of stood back. She knew she couldn`t help me, but she didn`t stand in my way. And she was proud of me, as long as I stayed within the confines of the Catholic Church.

She still thinks there`s too much sex in my books, which is really a laugh because there`s hardly any sex in them. What she had seen in Barnard also was a threat to the Catholic world.

My children-son, David, 6, and daughter Anna, 9-are the most recent important additions to my life. I just can`t imagine a life without them. They are the greatest source of joy to me in the world. It`s difficult to try to put it into words.

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It`s not that conflict doesn`t arise when you have children and you try to work. But having children just ties you into life in an entirely new way. You also feel much more vulnerable. I think you have a new stake in the world. You look at it differently.

It`s a kind of love that`s not like any other love. It`s very physical. I think it`s much more physical than anybody admits.

It`s at least as physical as sexual love because you adore them in body-that hair, that skin. So I think their attractiveness enables you to be quite self-sacrificing. But not all the time.

Women who devote themselves completely to their children sometimes can enjoy them least because all their energy is concentrated on these children who shouldn`t have that much energy concentrated on them. They`re their own people; they`re not clay that you`re going to form.

I realize how difficult motherhood is for many women. I was tremendously lucky because I had my own work established before I had children. But because of them I feel that I know something about life that`s both profound and joyous, as well as frightening. And this affects my writing.

I still search to find a balance between Catholicism and Judaism. Even in the matter of my children`s education, I fudge everything.

Their father is Protestant, so they go to church with him, and to Catholic church, and I take them to the High Holy Days at the synagogue.

I just feel that whatever is right for them they will someday know and feel and I just want to give them all the options that I can.

Jews know different things about living than the Irish and the Catholics and I like putting the two together. Jews are good at living and Irish are good at dying.

When everything is really going terribly for you, the Irish are really good. That whole system kind of clicks in. But they`re not very good at richness and pleasure, which I think the Jews have a real instinct for.

So I like putting the two together.