Book description
Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the
twenties, when she was orphaned in a world of relations as colourful,
potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There were her
grandmothers: one was a blood-curdling Catholic who combined piousness
and pugnacity; the other was Jewish and wore a veil to hide 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 helped to inspire her devastating sense of the sublime and
ridiculous and her witty, novelist's imagination. Mary McCarthy was a
well-known novelist, critic, journalist and memoirist. She was born in
Seattle, of mixed Catholic, Protestant and Jewish descent. She died in
October 1989.
