Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (A Harvest/Hbj Book)

Rating:
Summary: Poor Little Rich Girl
Review: I have always held a fascination for people who grew up with a real sense of religion that later fell away from the faith. I bought this book expecting something akin to the movies that are so prevalent nowadays about the catholic schoolboys smoking and getting caught by the nuns and hit with a ruler across the wrists. Instead, I was greeted with an amazing tale of Mary and her sad loss of her parents, pitiful existence with her aunt and uncle and twisted "saving" by her West Coast relatives.

The childhood she had was less than perfect, I agree, but the fact that she survived it and lived to create such a wonderful literary account of it almost makes me appreciative of her having to go through it. The chapter on her grandmother is so reminiscent of my own mother that I had to laugh out loud at times.

Well worth the read and the struggle through the many latin references and unfamiliar religious practices.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, analytical, and literary memoir
Review: That Mary McCarthy's childhood was difficult and unpleasant is well recognized. She has created a worthy and literary memoir from the material gathered during the years before she was claimed by her benevolent Seattle grandparents from the truly draconian aunt and uncle who kept her for 5 years prior to that. Somewhere along the way, this child who was probably difficult and moody - and certainly intelligent and scathingly witty - developed the ability to step outside herself, observe what was happening, remember it, then later write about it. The result is a classic memoir that deserves to be read by writers as well as the general reading audience. Funny, heartbreaking, sarcastic, bitingly acerbic - and always excellent.

Rating:
Summary: A Conglomeration
Review: This is the type of book that I think of as a conglomeration but not really a book. That is, she had published several magazine articles, then gathered them together and made a book. I find that style difficult to get into. She glossed over too much; so many years were packed into just a couple pages.

It irritated me after I kept reading and reading, and she kept criticizing and criticizing the people who raised her after her parents died. I sure didn't blame her for criticizing her father's side of the family. But her criticism didn't end with them. She didn't have many kind words for anyone.