Stanford Humanities Center
Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
"If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
Join Another Look Book Club for a discussion of Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. In her 1957 book, the author describes living among a complicated, sometimes abusive, extended family after her her parents died during the 1918 flu epidemic. She writes with merciless wit and frankness.
While appreciating the classical foundation her Catholic education gave her, she defiantly and publicly lost her faith during her years at a convent school – first as a stunt, then in earnest. According to The New York Times, she was “harshly given every opportunity to become one of the lost, and yet went on to create in modern idioms a style based on classic Latin satire.”
The discussion will be led by National Medal of Arts winner Tobias Wolff, joined by author Catherine Wolff and Inga Pierson, an English teacher at Sacred Heart in Menlo Park and a former Stanford fellow.
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