Where we are, where we have been, affects who we are. But the title, Seeing Through Places, is misleading: this is not a book about the way places in the abstract affect how people in general see. Gordon has written a memoir about how specific places have shaped her. She has an uncanny ability to interpret her childhood from an adult perspective.

Much of the book focuses on Gordon’s childhood in the 1950s and 1960s in Queens and Long Island, New York. There are chapters dedicated to a next-door neighbor’s home, a place where Gordon was babysat, and to spaces where she played when at home.

In the last three chapters Gordon addresses her adulthood. She writes of Rome, both how she imagined it as a child: static as the photos in her ViewMaster; and how she experienced it as an adult: a place designed for seeing, a place she could enjoy so long as she kept her back to the Vatican. Then Cape Cod, where for several summers she rented what she calls . . . "the only house that I have ever really loved." She ends up on New York’s Upper West Side, finally at home, teaching at Barnard College.

Gordon’s world isn’t hostile, nor is it entirely hospitable. She had odds to overcome: her father died while she was still young, and she was raised by an alcoholic mother who was partially disabled from polio. And Gordon had something else to overcome: a religion she experienced as oppressive. She lived in an atmosphere where the simplest pleasure could be condemned; even the most congenial situation could be misread as ominous.

Sexuality is significant to the story. In fact, the central moment occurs when a priest tells her at confession not to worry about a particular sexual activity. She leaves the confessional in a daze; from that moment, she is on her way to liberation. Gordon leaves the church in search of herself and a place where she can be intellectually honest, a place where creativity and questioning are encouraged and even rewarded.

That place was a college campus. Gordon "finds herself" –as a student, and later as a professor–in that setting. There she asks, "How did this happen to me?" She had envisioned things much differently: "How has it come about that I have, to this point, escaped my fate, that I am here, in the sun, under the blue sky, not a martyr?" (205)

I ask myself similar questions. Like Gordon, I have felt oppressed by religion. I have left a church, and I have returned. But the person who returns is not the person who left. Like the prodigal son, one sees a lot on one’s journey. But in contrast to the prodigal son, one need not end up eating with the pigs; like Gordon, one can learn along the way. Nor is the place to which one returns the same as the place one left. It cannot be. For just as place affects how we see, so does our vision–a vision determined partly by where we have been–affect our experience of place.

Gordon has admirably described her own spiritual journeys. Readers who have escaped, or who long to escape, a religion they experience as oppressive are especially likely to appreciate the book. But most readers should find Seeing Through Places an instructive and evocative guide to evaluating the places that have shaped who they are.

A memoir should do more than tell us about an interesting person. Like all good writing, it ought to tell us something about ourselves. Gordon’s writing does more than present pictures of her childhood: she conjured elements of my own. My reading was hindered, though profitably, by the desire to stop and ponder how places affected my seeing. My pondering, like Gordon’s memoir, was occasionally nostalgic, but more often an attempt to look honestly, really look, at where I’d been, and how that made me who I am.