Mary Gordon grew up in Valley Stream, New York, a few towns southeast of Queens. Her early books are about the effects of an orthodox Irish-Catholic background on women and her later novels are about being a woman and an artist. Her 1978 novel, 'Final Payments', made her an overnight success at age 29. She continued her career with 1981's bestseller 'The Company of Women', won the O. Henry award for short fiction in 1996, and received much acclaim for the 1996 memoir 'The Shadow Man', her autobiographical search for the true identity of her father, who was born in Vilna, Lithuania, and whose immigrant family spoke only Yiddish; a Jew who converted to Catholicism in 1937, he died when she was 7 years old. Her mother was Anna Gagliano, a legal secretary, the daughter of Italian and Irish immigrants who never went past the eighth grade. Gordon studied at Barnard and at Syracuse University. Her first husband was an Englishman whom she met while living in London.