“If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.” Mary McCarthy’s memoir comes to Stanford.

In school, character is fate.” (Courtesy Vassar Archives)

You think the coronavirus is bad? Novelist Mary McCarthy will tell you about about one of the epic plagues of modern times.

Both her indulgent, fun-loving parents died during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Then she and her three brothers were shuttled among relatives, some of them abusive. In her 1957 book, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, she describes it all with merciless wit and frankness.

Now her book is coming to Stanford. It will be discussed at the Another Look winter event at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 19, at the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall.

She was first sent to a Catholic convent school in Seattle, later to an Episcopalian seminary in Tacoma. While appreciating the classical foundation her Catholic education gave her, she defiantly and publicly lost her faith during those years – first as a stunt, then in earnest. She eventually graduated from Vassar.

Toby is leading the discussion.

“She never spares herself at all,” wrote Charles Poore in The New York Times. “The vanities and ambitions, the resentments and misunderstandings, the small triumphs and the scarring disasters that marked her early years are set forth with remarkable candor, so that her book is the most incisive contribution to the story of her development as an artist that we shall ever have.” 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 conversation will be led by author Tobias Wolff, founding director of Another Look and a National Medal of Arts winner. Panelists include his wife, the author Catherine Wolff and Another Look regular Inga Pierson, a former Stanford fellow who brings some personal experience to bear on the subject: she is  an English teacher at Sacred Heart Preparatory in Menlo Park.

Inga’s coming, too.

The event is free and open to the public. Come early for best seats. And Stanford Bookstore on campus, Kepler’s in Menlo Park, and Bell’s Books in Palo Alto are carrying the books.

The Another Look book club focuses on short classics that have been forgotten, neglected, or overlooked—or may simply not have received the attention they merit. The selected works are short, in order to encourage the involvement of Bay Area readers whose time may be limited. Subscription at anotherlook.stanford.edu is encouraged for regular updates and details on the selected books and events.

Tags: Catherine Wolff, Inga Pierson, Mary McCarthy, Tobias Wolff

This entry was posted on Monday, February 3rd, 2020 at 8:42 pm by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.