Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Mary McCarthy
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From the publisher
Introduction by Colm Tóibín
Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the 1920s, when she was orphaned into a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There was her Catholic grandmother who combined piousness with pugnacity, and her veiled Jewish grandmother who mourned the disastrous effects of a face-lift; there was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul, and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil, and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy ‘mouth-breathing’. ‘Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs,’ Mary McCarthy says, ‘I have wished that I were writing fiction.’ But these were the people, along with the Ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who inspired her engaging perception, her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous, and her witty, novelist’s imagination. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a major work by one of the leading American intellectuals of the twentieth century – witty, scathing, piercingly insightful and stylishly written.
‘First Lady of American Letters … our Joan of Arc.’
— Norman Mailer
‘When my friends and I were in our twenties in the 1950s, we read two writers – Colette and Mary McCarthy – as others read the Bible: to learn better who we were and how, given the constraint of our condition, we were to live.’
— Vivian Gornick
‘Superb... so heartbreaking that in comparison Jane Eyre seems to have got off lightly.’
— Anita Brookner, Spectator
‘Brilliant.’
— Penelope Lively, Telegraph
‘Published in 1957, [Memories of a Catholic Girlhood] is considered by some to be the best of her two dozen books, including eight novels and several volumes of essays, reportage and criticism. Its superiority derives not only from the passionate sense of justice that imbues the depiction of her ghastly Cinderella childhood, but also the singular circumstances of its composition.’
— J. Michael Lennon, Times Literary Supplement