Mary Gordon was born in Far Rockaway, New York, to Anna Gagliano Gordon, an Italian-Irish Catholic mother, and David Gordon, a Jewish father who converted to Catholicism. While growing up, she lived for a number of years in Valley Stream and attended The Mary Louis Academy. She is Catholic.

She received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1971, and her M.A. from Syracuse University in 1973. Gordon lived in New Paltz, New York for a time during the 1980's. She and her husband, Arthur Cash, live in New York City and Hope Valley, Rhode Island. They have two adult children, Anna and David. Gordon is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. Cash is retired.

In 1981, she wrote the foreword to the Harvest edition of Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own."

Novelist Galaxy Craze has said of Gordon, "She loves to read; she would read us passages in class and start crying, she's so moved by really good writing. And she was the only good writing teacher at Barnard, so I just kept taking her class over and over. She taught me so much." The BEATRICE Interview: 1999

Circling My Mother: A Memoir (2007) marked her return to nonfiction after two works of fiction.

In 2009 she published a book called Reading Jesus. It uses Gordon's literary training to read the Gospels.

Novels

• Final Payments (1978) ISBN 0-394-42793-9
• The Company of Women (1981) ISBN 0-394-50508-5
• Men and Angels (1985) ISBN 0-394-52403-9
• The Other Side (1989) ISBN 0-670-82566-2
• Spending (1998) ISBN 0-684-85204-7
• Pearl (2005) ISBN 0-375-42315-X

Novellas and short story collections

• The Rest of Life: Three Novellas (1994) ISBN 0-14-014907-4
• Temporary Shelter (1987) ISBN 0-394-55520-1
• The Stories of Mary Gordon (2006) ISBN 0-375-42316-8 (collects Temporary Shelter and 22 previously uncollected stories)

Non-fiction

• Memoirs
• The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search For Her Father (1996) ISBN 0-679-74931-4
• Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity (2000) ISBN 0-684-86255-7
• Circling My Mother: A Memoir (2007) ISBN 0-375-42456-3

• Essays
• Good Boys and Dead Girls, and Other Essays (1991) ISBN 0-670-82567-0

• Religion
• Reading Jesus (2009) ISBN 0-375-42457-1

• Biography
• Joan of Arc (2000) ISBN 0-670-88537-1

The Stories of Mary Gordon won The Story Prize in 2007. In March, 2008 Governor Eliot Spitzer named Mary Gordon the official New York State Author and gave her the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction. Barnard Prof Named New York State Author | Columbia Spectator