Mary Gordon's father once told her, I love you more than God. They both wanted her to be a saint. This passionate man was Mary's first object of romance, the writer who made her certain to be a writer. He died when Mary was only seven. She worried over memories of her father in the years that followed like a tongue over a chipped tooth. Was he the dashing father in a hat and hard brown shoes striding down Fifth Avenue or the mishugah who couldn't keep a job? Mary Gordon took a perilous leap into the realm of memory to see what she could actually verify. As scholar detective, she sniffed through periodicals he had published in the 1920s and 30s - a children's magazine largely dedicated to her; the a girlie annual which incroporated increasingly distressing political opinions as the 40s approached. Here was a Lithuanian Jew turned right-wing anti-semitic Catholic, whose roots she had never explored. Mary, the scholar, critic and sleuth turned historian and archivist, as a completely unexpected past for her father began to emerge from official records. Mary Gordon is the author of Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels and The Other Side. She is also the author of the stories collections, Temporary Shelter and The Rest of Life.