Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic

Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs

Three candid, affecting memoirs by the #1 New York Timesâ€“bestselling author of The Group, including a National Book Award finalist.

InÂ Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy begins with her recollections of a happy childhood cut tragically short by the death of her parents during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Tempering memory with invention, McCarthy describes how, orphaned at six, she spent much of her childhood shuttled between two sets of grandparents and three religionsâ€”Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. Early on, McCarthy lets the reader in on her secret: The chapter you just read may not be wholly reliableâ€”facts have been distilled through the hazy lens of time and distance.

How I GrewÂ is McCarthyâ€™s intensely personal autobiography of her life from age thirteen to twenty-one. With detail driven by an almost astonishing memory recall, the author gives us a masterful account of these formative years. From her wild adolescenceâ€”including losing her virginity at fourteenâ€”through her eventual escape to Vassar, the bestselling novelist, essayist, and critic chronicles her relationships with family, friends, lovers, and the teachers who would influence her writing career.

AndÂ Intellectual MemoirsÂ opens with McCarthy as a married twenty-four-year-old Communist and critic. Sheâ€™s disciplined, dedicated, and sexually experimental: At one point she realizes that in twenty-four hours she â€œhad slept with three different men.â€ Over the course of three years, she will have had two husbands, the second being the esteemed, much older critic Edmund Wilson. It is Wilson who becomes McCarthyâ€™s mentor and muse, urging her to try her hand at fiction.Â Intellectual MemoirsÂ is a vivid snapshot of a distinctive place and timeâ€”New York in the late 1930sâ€”and the forces that shaped Mary McCarthyâ€™s life as a woman and a writer.Â
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Country USA
Manufacturer Open Road Media
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2013-12-10
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Open Road Media
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2013-12-10
Format	Kindle eBook

Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs

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