Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy

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.

REVIEWS

"It could be argued that [McCarthy’s] finest book is Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, first published in 1957 and now reissued in a handsome paperback by Fitzcarraldo Editions.... Colm Tóibín, in his sympathetic and subtle introduction, notes the similarities between Mary McCarthy and the poet Elizabeth Bishop, both of whom grew up parentless, and used their orphanhood as literary material. Yet the biographies of both women bespeak an incurable sadness and a sense of damage, however bravely borne. McCarthy was the sprightlier and more feisty of the two, and in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood she made a small, or perhaps more than small, masterpiece."
― John Banville, Observer

"McCarthy has integrity, writes what she wants and keeps you with her all the way. The end notes following each chapter let McCarthy play a confident game of truth-twisting, flagging her narrative inventions without so much as the whiff of an apology…. I fear McCarthy would be disappointed in me for giving an unqualified rave review, my critical faculties seduced by her rakish pen…. As a ruthlessly honest interrogation of family dynamics, as an account of a 1920s Irish-American life before it became fashionable, and as a portrait of an intellectual awakening – this memoir stands as a classic."― Irish Times 

"Admission of changed names and hazarded dialogue is now common practice in memoir but, as the novelist Colm Tóibín describes in his introduction to this smart new edition, McCarthy is after more than just the trust of her reader. She set herself free with these well-integrated addenda, gave herself permission to write “scenes and characters that were more memorable than adherence to any set of full facts might demand”. And the tactic works. A big part of the book’s charm is its self-consciousness…. Few writers have captured so precisely what it means to be the kind of resolute child who believes forcefully and dutifully in whatever it is they happen to be convinced by that day. This is a book worthy of its label: a true classic.’
―Sunday Times   

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback with French flaps
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
ISBN: 978-1804271650
Pages: 264