Reading Mary Gordon's new memoir is like engaging in a series of conversations, learning bits and pieces about a mother and daughter over time.

		"CIRCLING MY MOTHER" By Mary Gordon Pantheon ($24)

Gordon tells us her mother's last years were terrible due to dementia. She discusses her mother's pride, workaholism and loneliness. Gordon's was a 1950s and '60s childhood. Through her writer's gaze backward, we get not only a picture of Anna Gordon, but also of an America at that point in our social histories.

A mother -- or more specifically, a daughter's history with her complex mother -- is an outsized thing. Writers often break off a small portion to make a novel (as Gordon has done) with a narrative focus that helps to select material.

But Gordon has the itch to fit a great deal in -- all the things that mattered to her and still do. So she sensibly abandons a narrative timeline for a more associative, fractured history.

She circles her mother, making pictures from different angles. "I had to walk around her life, to view it from many points." The 10 essays in the book have titles like "My Mother and Her Sisters," "My Mother and Her Friends," "My Mother and Priests."

Anna Gagliano Gordon makes a good subject. She is a doer with plenty of obstacles in her life: Polio, widowhood, single-motherhood, alcoholism and eventually dementia.

She was tough and delicate, prideful and humble, and Gordon tries to give a full picture of her mother's life with all its jagged, rough, unfinished edges.

In an age when most Catholic mothers wore housedresses, stayed home and gossiped with others like them, Anna Gordon wore stockings and perfume, worked for an attorney and socialized with women who liked to go to the theater and a good restaurant.

She and her friends were women who "could become larger than what they were born into."

Anna stands apart, different. Even in her family, she lives on the margins, constantly hurt by cruel siblings. She marries late and is widowed early in the marriage.

She's religious and relies on priests, as many women did at that time to fill in for whatever males were missing in their lives. The lives of a widowed mother and only child are deeply intertwined. For Mary, a fatherless daughter, the priests become substitute fathers.

While doing portraits of her mother, Gordon mainly captures her own childhood. This memoir catalogs how a writer observes and remembers. For instance, she describes a woman, Peggy Campbell, one of her mother's friends, this way:

"Though she wasn't beautiful, her looks were very pleasing to me." Foremost is the memory of "her swimming blue eyes which always looked as if she'd just got over crying but wouldn't want to burden us with the details."

The first and last chapters -- accounts of her mother's illness and death -- are linked by constant references to Bonnard's paintings. Gordon loves the painter and wants to bring a kind of painterly light to her mother.

"Or," she writes, "perhaps I invoke Bonnard simply to allow myself a companion on the journey." But the references to his paintings seem a little forced. Her mother, as subject, argues with Gordon's wish to soften, romanticize.

And so does Gordon's innate honesty.

For instance, she admits that thinking and writing about her mother's body (crippled by polio, uncared for and rotting in the years of dementia) repulses her. She can't imagine how her father would have wanted to make love to her mother; her mind balks at the image.

And in the final years, when Gordon had to buy clothes for her mother, she bought whatever she could find for a few dollars in a discount clothing store. These revelations are jarring. But Gordon wants to paint the truth as much as she wants to light it artfully, and the truth isn't always pretty.