Title | : | How I Grew |
Author | : | |
Rating | : | |
ISBN | : | - |
Language | : | English |
Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
Number of Pages | : | 300 |
Publication | : | First published January 1, 1987 |
How I Grew is Mary McCarthy’s intensely personal autobiography of her life from age thirteen to twenty-one.
Orphaned at six, McCarthy was raised by her maternal grandparents in Seattle, Washington. Although her official birthdate is in 1912, it wasn’t until she turned thirteen that, in McCarthy’s own words, she was “born as a mind.” With detail driven by an almost astonishing memory recall, McCarthy gives us a masterful account of these formative years. From her wild adolescence—including losing her virginity at fourteen—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.
Filled with McCarthy’s penetrating insights and trenchant wit, this is an unblinkingly honest and fearless self-portrait of a young woman coming of age—and the perfect companion to McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood .
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate.
How I Grew Reviews
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I was looking through my e-book libraries and came across this second memoir by Mary McCarthy. I was enraptured by her first memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, published in 1957 when she was 45. How I Grew was published 30 years later when she was 75. She died in 1989.
In this volume she looks back on her teenage and college years. It ends when she married her first husband. (She had four husbands.)
I was not as impressed with How I Grew. It lists books and authors and friends unfamiliar to me. She is looking back from her elderly years and delving into depths of memory. She must have kept journals because she is able to recall all those names and events. Yet, I am doing the same thing in my writing and from the same number of years later, so who am I to criticize?
I have admired this woman for decades. I have read her novels and some of her other works. She was a merciless literary critic and staunchly against the Vietnam War. She fought feminist battles in journalism and literary arenas from the 1950s on.
When I finished the book, I understood that I had wandered with her in those years as she questioned and revised her memories. Sex was a wilderness for women in the 1930s and 1940s. I had to laugh out loud when she wrote about losing her virginity three times! She has a wry sense of humor in these pages and a willingness to admit that she saw her life differently when younger, that she understood it better on looking back.
It was worthwhile to spend three days with Mary in the thickets of memory and youth. I lost no admiration for her but in fact gained more. She was smart, brave, persistent and broke ground for women in the writing world. -
I picked this up at the transfer station and though not a fan of memoir I'll give it a shot starting this evening. Read "The Group" many years ago and saw the so-so movie. Which one was the author? Shirley Knight(Hopkins) I think... MM was born the same year as my father and lost both her parents to a flu epidemic. William Maxwell lost his mother to influenza and wrote about it in "They Came Like Swallows". This one of two girlhood memoirs. Haven't read the other.
Some G'reads reviews call it boring and I can see that but so far it's much preferable to Mary Karr's disguised, dishonest, novelistic "memoirs". The "it's boring" judgement also runs a bit counter to the fact that a prominent 20th century writer is documenting her early years as a reader. To me that's inherently interesting. A very straightforward approach is taken and as far as I'm concerned that's the way to go. Apparently she was acquainted with the Blethen family in 1920's Seattle. These newspaper tycoons bought into some Maine papers about 15 years ago give or take but have since sold out. Interesting to see what existed in Seattle and Minneapolis for a young woman's education. Not much that was of any practical value since women were mostly slated for marriage and reproduction back then. Her literary world was also restricted as far as modernism was concerned. Like me she was interested in finding out about real sex and real people(in books). Unlike me she was a voracious reader even at an ealy age. I liked to read but wasn't "bookish". So far very little mention of her semi-famous actor brother Kevin.
- Mentions "House OF the Pines" girls boarding school(in SE Mass.)... When my sister went there it was "House IN the Pines". Now defunct I think...
Just finished the account of MM's first "love". A pretty sordid story of male predation on a young girl. Her words are blunt and straightforward. Depressing and yes, factually similar to Mary Karr's own accounts of older male abuse.
Work time demands mean slow reading progress but now I have some time off and will finish this. Now almost up to the Vassar years and still very straightforward, including the account of another sexually flat affair for the teenaged MM with a local artist. Reminiscent of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". More male sexual exploitation of a young girl. MM seems very detached in her account. No doubt the absense of parents contributed to her plight. She was sort of on her own there.
Once again I appreciate the effort to be objective and observant of the the author's own emotional and intellectual development. Edward St. Aubyn wrote his Patrick Melrose novels as fiction though based on his own life. Mary Karr's cooked up stories of her own life are full inauthenticity, particularly including dialogue the author could not possibly have accurately remembered. If those conversations even took place at all. Phony, phony, phony...
We're finally at Vassar and MM has met and miraculously re-met her first husband to be(an actor). The picture of him in the book shows a man of about 30 looking like 45. Through him she mentions(and presumably met) then-unknown actors Sig Rumann and Eduardo Cianelli, both of whom became well-used character actors in Hollywood later on. Sig was the original Sgt. Schultz(?) in the film "Stalag 17". She mentions(looking forward) her "group" of friends she acquires by senior year, most of whom are Manhattan socialites. From that came her most famous book "The Group". One more night...
And done now with a dissappointinly abrupt account of the Vassar years. Still interesting to see what books read we had in common. Not many as it turns out. So much of late 19th/early 20th century fiction is lost in the dust of history now. A few more Hollywood names dropped: Lloyd Nolan and Richard Whorf. At the end is nice listing of many of the names with some brief bios. Final verdict: OK but not really involving. Maybe she wrote it for the dough. 3.25* -
Highly detailed...did I say highly? of a certain era, 1920's and'30's and of a socio-economic educational class -of high standards.
I found it interesting as a(part)memoir. I know that I could not get away with this style of 'stream-of consciousness' writing. McCarthy, no doubt, is highly intellectual, and at times morally vacant, but expresses herself with such freedom, a privilege to one in later years who has established herself as a serious writer; her literary reputation affords her that freedom.
Her memory is exceptional as she names a great number of her classmates from private schools,(rarely anyone I'd heard of) and teachers that were part of her formative years through secondary, and postsecondary school. A bit of a 'who's who' of her times.
I did admire her as an energetic, enthusiastic reader, and a student of classics, art, literature, theatre, etc. Her thirst for knowledge is authentic, and admirable.
In this book, her life is a bit of a mess with men. She claims to have lost her virginity three times, and at 21 married a man nine years older that she did not love. Plenty of gossip - high-brow and esoteric style.
Given that I am writing a part-memoir, myself, I liked it! -
Though it lacks the meta-commentary that makes McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood so rich, How I Grew is still a satisfying read. In it McCarthy revisits her adolescence, from her intellectual nurturing at a Washington State boarding school through her blossoming into a literary identity at Vassar. It ends on the night of her marriage to the emotionally abusive Harold Johnsrud, with Mary lying awake in cold realization that the marriage was a mistake.
Johnsrud was the model for Harald Peterson of The Group, and I admit that part of the pleasure of How I Grew lies for me in visiting the real-life personae that Mary reproduces in her famously autofictional novels. It’s impossible, for instance, as the real group coalesces at Vassar, not to speculate about which one was Dottie and which Norine and most of all about which one was Lakey—on that latter, McCarthy denies that it was Elizabeth Bishop, though evidently Bishop thought it was. Other familiar characters find their way in, like the absurd art dealer of The Company She Keeps, who (according to How I Grew, at least) was presented with stunning faithfulness, despite his threatening to sue McCarthy if she didn’t change it up. (He also remained her lifelong friend and freelance client, evidently.)
But McCarthy’s main purpose here is not to expose other people; it’s self-examination. And for the most part, the people around her (save Johnsrud, perhaps, and the chap to which she lost her virginity at a shockingly young age) come out reasonably well; she is particularly praiseful of a few teachers who saw her potential and worked hard to nurture it, even in ways she didn’t appreciate at the time. Her critical eye turns mainly on herself. She acknowledges some gaps in her memory, and patches others with documentation and research. She lays bare the missteps of her adolescence in a very human and relatable way. -
A bent book. Mary is no role model.
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I couldn't BELIEVE how boring this was.
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"...I, too, the product of a Vassar education, am now brittle, smart, and a little empty. And oblivious of it." McCarthy is so scrupulous about her memories that she will often interrupt herself while recording a story to let the reader know what further information she has recovered in the process of trying to recall the story. The results can be unintentionally hilarious, or just embarrassing (OMG, so much keeping track of who is, and how much, Jewish), but everyone who is not a woman should be required to read chapter 3, where she describes loosing her virginity.
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The story of a self-proclaimed “intellectual” eager to list the books she’s read, the people she’s met, and all manner of extraneous content, mostly in list form. Remove the proper nouns and this memoir would be a quarter of its size.
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would have been 5 stars if it weren't for the part where she says emma and knightley ending up together was akin to natasha marrying pierre. did mary hate all canon couples in literature or what.
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This is the second volume of memoirs that Mary McCarthy wrote later in her life. This volume primarily covers her high school years in Seattle and her 4 years at Vassar. The book culminates in her first marriage and move to NYC.
McCarthy candidly admits that much of what she is writing about are really only later day rembrances of her youth and may not be entirely accurate. With that being said McCarthy is not afraid to reveal details about her life that do not portray her in a flattering light. Her account of how she lost her virginity at. The age of 15 is memorable and acerbically honest. This seconvolume was better then the first and I look forward to finishing the third volume soon.