Customer Reviews

A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

If you're looking for yet another biography of Lillian Hellman, this is not the book for you. LH is really the backdrop for the real story of Ms. Mahoney as a girl, and her relations with her mother (a drinker)and her family. In fact, the book is BEST when Ms. Hellman is off the stage and the author lets us peek in to her family life with mom, and the 7 (8?) children, all in pursuit of lunacy to a more or lesser degree. If you enjoy finely crafted writing, you'll love the long, lush (inadvertant pun noted) lyrical passages. Apparently, Ms. Mahoney has never met a metaphor she didn't like and the reader is all the richer for that. I suspect the author could make poetry out of the telephone book if she put her formidable talents to it. Someone else in these pages said that "A Likely Story" probably would not have been published if it had not been "about" a famous person. Sadly, that's true; which is a shame because the more interesting and likeable story is the one about the Mahoneys themselves.

This delightfully written memoir of disappointed youth harassed by vindictive old age is well worth the read. I can easily see Hellman as the woman about whom Mary McCarthy said, "Everthing that woman says is a lie, including 'and' and 'but.'" Mahoney's gimlet-eyed descriptions of Hellman's eccentricities and her lyrical depiction of the island are a pleasure to read.

This book is great. Rosemary Mahoney has done it again. Her keen eye for the details of life combined with her sharp wit have produced an excellent work. Funny and sad, a portrait of a teenage aspiring writer whose dream summer becomes a bit of a nightmare. The book made me laugh out-loud and at times i felt my eyes well up with tears. I have read all of mahoney's books but this one is the best. I could not put it down.

A Likely Story, is about a seventeen year old girl, who's hopes and dreams are to spend a summer of fun & friendship with Lillian Hellman, in hopes that greatness would rub off on her.

Rosemary was 17 when she wrote to Lillian Hellman, asking for a part-time summer job. To her surprise, Lillian hired her as a part-time live-in housekeeper, which became more than part-time. When Rosemary applied for the job, employment was the farthest thing from her mind. Rosemary was really only thinking of herself. What she really planned was to read, write, and becoming great friends with Lillian Hellman. But, Lillian had other ideas for Rosemary. And what Rosemary got was something else indeed.

This book is about the innocence's of a 17 year-old girl, her touch with reality and her painful coming of age. At times it's heart breaking to read, other times it is uproariously funny. Rosemary Mahoney makes you feel as if you are her, in her shoes, living her experiences, and feeling her emotions.

It's a good read for those times when you don't want to concentrate on a story line or try to solve a plot. Everything you need is right there for you. I hope you like it. I did.

Pam Stone back to the top

I think Mahoney caught a lot of undeserved flak for attackingan idol like Hellman. The book contains some of the sharpest insightsand most vivid word pictures you'll find anywhere, and if the narrative bogs down from time to time, well, that's the price for such a talent for physical description. I myself fell in love with Mahoney after reading the book, though I admit I would dread the idea of actually meeting her since her powers of observation are quite cold-eyed and one wonders if anyone could survive them...

First of all, this was a super-entertaining book and very good for a starry-eyed writer to read; bursts a necessary bubble. I've heard such tales before, but I needed another shot of reality, if only to protect my idols from ME!

At the risk of irritating the obviously sensitive author (a mini-Miss-Lily?) my take on her experience is that she couldn't get mad at her wise and loving mother for being an alcoholic and polio victim who Rosemary felt she had to protect and constantly save from disaster. She was needed as a caretaker and her mother was so obviously debilitated and yet trying so hard to do a good, if exhausting job herself. Also, Rosemary had been abandoned by her father and had obviously been lied to about that by her mother. So how could she rebel against such a saintly, sad, charming, hard-working woman, the only true source of love in her life?

O.K. Along comes Lillian Hellman - the perfect Mommie from Hell for a seventeen-year-old in need of someone or something to hate, hate, hate. They were made for each other. I loved them both in this vivid, hilarious, heartbreaking and compulsively readable story. Thanks to the author for many hours of enjoyment - I read half the book aloud to my husband, also a writer.

PS - Opening descriptions of Vineyard locals, especially the grocery crew, are adorable.

Rosemary Mahoney is an excellent writer who surely must have excelled when her writing class studied metaphors and similes. Even though I really enjoyed the book, I found parts frustrating -- the digression into overly-long discussions about Mahoney, her friends, her neuroses, and perhaps a short sentence here or there about something Hellman said. Painful analysis of that sentence, then more about Mahoney.

Rosemary Mahoney was a child when she worked for Hellman, so we can forgive the child for being somewhat of a nervous wreck during that summer. We can also forgive her (maybe) about being less than generous concerning Hellman's infirmities and what it means have to rely so much on those around her. Still, I wish Mahoney had more to offer in retrospect, from an adult's point of view.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The great thing about Mahoney's writing is that she has the ability to transport one to the place and time of her stories. She does this so well that one fells as if one is actually in the story. Her descriptions of events are so incredible that one can almost hear the voices, smell the scents and touch and feel objects. Mahoney, although an adult now, brings us to the place of an adolescent's (in this case her own) coming of age. In fact she does such a good job that other reviewers want her (the adult Mahoney) to grow up. In misplaced criticism some feel the adult Mahoney hasn't yet grown up. I would say this only lends credence to Mahoney's ability to tell a great story. This is a story of adolescence angst and coming of age and if you want to tell the protagonist in the story to grow up than I would say Mahoney has done a great job of bringing the angst of adolescence to adult viewers. However, to criticize Mahoney as not having grown up herself yet only supports her ability to tell a realistic story. In this story we have been transported so cleverly to the place of adolescent angst that some of us want the author to grow up. Mahoney's story of adolescent angst and coming of age under the thumb of the irascible Hellman is not to be missed.

If you're interested in Mahoney herself, this must be good-read. You will understand some part of her own life and character. However, the relationship between Mahoney and Hellman was too little to describe well about LH.

If you like to know more about Lillian Hellman, I'd recommend you to read "Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman" written by Peter Feibleman.

Rosemary Mahoney's, A Likely Story, about the harrowing summer the author spent working for playwright Lillian Hellman on Martha's Vineyard, is in a totally different league from the avalanche of earnest "memoirs" that clutter the new and noteworthy book tables at megastores these days. Mahoney doesn't serve up the usual soul baring on the way to self healing that ends up making you feel like you just sat in on someone's (appropriately sanitized) therapy sessions, but rather the heart-wrenching and hilarious truth about being seventeen.

Mahoney knows that to be any good, a story must entertain and entertain this one does, with a parade of meticulously observed and remembered scenes that has you licking your chops for more, but the true brilliance of A Likely Story lies in its voice. Mahoney doesn't philosophize about the events of that long past summer from the vantage point of a now much-the-wiser adult; she gives her reader more credit and more fun than that, flinging us into the middle of those events, literally wrapping us in the skin of her seventeen year old self.

Whether caught in a vertiginous exchange with the tyrannical Hellman, serving dinner to Hellman's laughably insecure celebrity guests, or slowly realizing the worthiness of her own mother on a rainy afternoon in Vineyard Haven, Mahoney never slips out of character. We see though her eyes, think with her mind and feel with her heart.

In the recreation of the teenager she once was, Rosemary Mahoney has given us a character that stands beside Salinger's Holden Caufield -- a lonely, wonderfully funny and sad adolescent, caught between innocence and experience by a true exercise of literary art.