Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy

First published: 1957

The Work

In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy collected eight memoirs that she had previously published in magazines such as The New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar. Her introductory chapter, “To the Reader,” describes her hope to create as accurate a record as possible of her role in her family’s history, from early childhood until she attended Vassar. In fact, she frequently attempted to check the facts that appeared in the articles with another source. However, as an orphan “the chain of recollection—the collective memory of a family—has been broken.” Thus, she compares herself and her brother, Kevin, to archaeologists who search for scraps of information to reconstruct events and discover motives to explain the events of their childhood.

McCarthy’s parents, Roy McCarthy and Therese Preston, both came from wealthy families. Her father’s family were Irish Catholics; she described the men as handsome, imagining they had once been “wreckers,” plundering ships that foundered off the shore of Nova Scotia. Her mother’s parents represented two separate cultural backgrounds. Harold Preston was a well-to-do Episcopalian; he worked as a lawyer. Augusta Morgenstern was a Jewish beauty. In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, McCarthy seeks to find her place in this varied group.

She recalls her early childhood as idyllic. Although her father was at times irresponsible with money, the home was loving for Mary and her three younger brothers. Unfortunately, both parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. That marked the end of McCarthy’s secure home environment. She was never to regain the tranquillity of her early childhood. Immediately after the children were orphaned, they were placed with a great-aunt and her abusive husband in a home only two blocks from the McCarthy mansion. Regular beatings and deprivation became the substitute for indulgence. After four years, her grandfather Preston rescued her, but her brothers remained behind.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood records her attempts to find an identity in each new environment she faced. She discusses her desire to stand out in the convent school where she went for seventh and eighth grades. She was fascinated by the romantic names of the other girls at the school. She decided that names were the clue to everything. She spent successive years in a public school, then an Episcopal boarding school. Her life became a continual struggle to belong or to be noticed. Even in the Preston’s home, she was aware of her isolation, describing it as a house of “shut doors and silences.”

She explores all her different childhood locales, providing brilliant portraits: her Jewish aunts and the social sets in which they moved; the friends she visits in the West, where she finds a totally foreign culture; her family and herself, a girl searching for belonging.

Bibliography

Brightman, Carol. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1992. This biography’s prologue sets the sexual, investigative tone of the book, attempting to divine from McCarthy’s prose her attitudes and beliefs about her own sexuality. Part 1 deals with McCarthy’s life as explained by McCarthy in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.

Eakin, Paul John. “Fiction in Autobiography: Ask Mary McCarthy No Questions.” In Fictions in Autobiography:Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. This chapter examines McCarthy’s autobiographical essays—especially those contained in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood—and argues that “autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in an intricate process of self-discovery and self-creation.”

Hardy, Willene Schaefer. Mary McCarthy. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. The second chapter of this biography examines Memories of a Catholic Girlhood in some depth, examining each essay and comparing elements within the autobiography to those in McCarthy’s fiction.

Rose, Barbara. “I’ll Tell You No Lies: Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and the Fictions of Authority.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 9, no. 1 (Spring, 1990): 107-126. This essay discusses the dilemma inherent in traditional views of gender when it comes to autobiography. Because men often describe their individuality via their contrast with others, women who choose to imitate male patterns of autobiography are paradoxically placed as “other” in their own stories. Rose argues that, because of this skewed perception, women’s autobiographies are more often scrutinized for “truth” than are men’s.

Rudikoff, Sonya. “An American Woman of Letters.” The Hudson Review 42, no. 1 (Spring, 1989): 45-55. This essay argues that McCarthy’s need, as an orphan, to organize her life and to invent her own history through her autobiographical writings relates directly to her denial of ever having been confronted with the problem of being a woman. Rudikoff undermines McCarthy’s denial to show that her writing is best understood in the context of being a woman and sharing her life with other women.