Title: A wonderful book
Product review: Written long before the recent memoir craze, this book stands as one of the best of that genre. McCarthy looks back on an almost Dickensian childhood with wit and discernment. Perhaps most striking is the lack of defensiveness; writing of abuse suffered at the hands of a misguided great aunt and her sadistic husband, she traces the way it shaped her character but never uses it as an excuse. Nor is she more sparing of herself than of her relatives: she not only gives us a portrait of a realistically foolish, self-conscious adolescent Mary--recounting the sorts of youthful episodes many of us continue to blush over as we remember them in adulthood--but in notes appended to each chapter she deconstructs her own memories, noting where she has given in to the urge to dramatize or where her recollections conflict with those of others who were present. A wonderfully honest, bracing book, refreshing in its lack of grievance and its unostentatious, unsentimental good humor.
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