How I Grew [Paperback]

Mary Mccarthy (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade & Reference Publishers; First Edition,Front Cover Bent & Beat Up edition (1987)
• ASIN: B000I340V4
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of an Amazing Woman as a Young Girl, August 15, 2001

By 

Andrei Sizov (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How I Grew (Paperback)

Each time I reread "How I Grew" I enjoy it more. Mary McCarthy paints a picture of herself coming of age intellectually , alongside engaging and often hilarious descriptions of the people she meets in these formative years between age 13 and 21, the town she grows up in (Seattle), and her early experiences at Vassar. What I love most is her chronicle of the most important and influential books and teachers in her life at this time, and how they shaped and sharpened her already apparent keen intelligence. Witty, self-deprecating, acid-tongued, insightful, and admittedly selective in her memories, in this book Mary McCarthy gives us some clues as to how a young girl with a formidable intellect grew into one of America's literary giants.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Read Memories of a Catholic Girlhood instead, June 23, 2005

By 

Byron the Bulb - See all my reviews

This review is from: How I Grew (Hardcover)

I love most of Mary McCarthy, but in my opinion, this is her weakest book. It covers basically the same territory as Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which she wrote in the 1950s. Here, however, there's little trace of her signature, tightly-wrought style. Instead, the style is baggy, with convoluted sentences, chatty asides, digressions within digressions, and endless lists of books she read, names of friends, etc. As a result, I often lost track of the basic story - which, after all, was the exact same story she had already told in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. I'm rather confused as to why McCarthy wrote this book at all. Given that she had already written a detailed memoir of her formative years, why not just skip ahead to the mid-1930s, the subject of her unfinished "Intellectual Memoirs"?

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My grandmother was Czerna Wilson, grandfather Carl Wilson, January 12, 2009

By 

MaryAnn F. Kohl "author, educator" (Bellingham, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How I Grew (Paperback)

My grandmother is the "fabled Czerna Wilson" in this book. I could offer some facts that are unknown to the author of this book, if someone is interested.