A Likely Story: One summer with Lillian Hellman [Hardcover]

Rosemary Mahoney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 3, 1998

In 1978, Rosemary Mahoney, an aspiring young writer of seventeen, wrote a letter to one of her personal idols, inquiring whether this great lady of American letters might need some domestic help during the summer.

When Lillian Hellman responded affirmatively, Mahoney was ecstatic, and wasted no time imagining that the summer in Hellman's employ might cement a friendship with the iconic writer, or that the proximity to greatness might spur her own fledgling literary efforts.

In reality, Mahoney was lonesome and anxious, hiding behind a facade of self-confidence at a private New England boarding school, harboring the secrets of her complex Irish family.  Mahoney saw in Hellman an escape and a salvation from the rigors of growing up.

But once she secured the job, her hopes were swiftly shattered as the summer unfolded into an exquisite and grueling exercise in humiliation at the hands of the famously acerbic Hellman and her retinue of celebrated friends.

Contrasting the vanity of a seventeen-year-old with that of a seventy-three-year-old, this book is ultimately about the limitations of age, the complexities of literary ambition, and our need for heroes.  By turns heartbreaking and uproariously funny, A Likely Story portrays the painful coming of age of a brilliant young writer and, by extension, the universal story of innocence lost.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the 1970s, many a precocious American teenager weaned herself on Lillian Hellman's An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time. So what if the author didn't look like her onscreen alter ego, Jane Fonda, in Julia. Few, of course, would have dared to act on their obsession. But Rosemary Mahoney did, telling the chain-smoking, hard-drinking Hellman that she would love to work for her on Martha's Vineyard "in any capacity." Who better to toil for than a star who "glorified bad moods, gave them a glamorous edge, brought them to the level of art"--or so the 17-year-old thought. In a fairy-tale-like development, Hellman took Mahoney on as her part-time housekeeper. But the fairy tale was almost instantly to end, and a more complex saga of innocence, experience, and class to begin.

During the summer of 1978, Rose quickly discovered that some bad moods were beyond glorification. Relations between employer and employee were out-of-kilter from the start, since Hellman's version of the job gave "part-time" an entirely new, 24-hour definition. The gig was a far cry from Mahoney's vision of the two of them "sitting at her table together, smoking cigarettes and making toasts to this and that with upraised glasses of a glowing amber drink (never mind that I had had only a few disastrous experiences with smoking and drinking), laughing sagely and discussing books and people and the world and life." Instead Mahoney's dream job was a mixture of tension and tedium as she bumbled around the house and stubbornly refused to admit how much she wanted to be thought worthy. What's more, the teenager felt deeply out of her element amid such Vineyard glitterati as William and Rose Styron, James Taylor and Carly Simon. Some might find her descriptions of the increasingly infirm Hellman less than generous, but the older Mahoney is very much watching herself in the wings and finding her younger self just as wanting. A Likely Story is a cautionary tale about adoration and celebrity from one of our more gifted journalists--each scene literally leaps off the page, fraught with emotion recollected not entirely in tranquillity. --Kerry Fried

From Publishers Weekly

The tribulations suffered by a 17-year-old girl working for a stubborn, acerbic 73-year-old woman may sound like a potential whine-fest. But when the narrator is a writer as gifted as Mahoney, and the older woman is none other than Lillian Hellman, the story becomes a compelling chronicle not only of an intergenerational combat of will and manners, but also of that terrible, wavering period of late adolescence when nothing is certain, and frustrations are legion. Although not at all domestic, Mahoney jumped at a chance to be Hellman's "part-time live-in housekeeper." But Martha's Vineyard became Mahoney's Omaha Beach, as she battles to keep emotionally intact. Less interesting is a tendency for the author to overwrite, often resorting to a repetitive excess of detailAe.g., there's only so much of the rather ghastly descriptions of Hellman's yellow buck teeth, failing, fishlike eyes and pallid sagging skin the reader can stand. The condescension that Mahoney occasionally displayed in the NBCC-finalist Whoredom in Kimmage is still here, although since it's directed at Hellman and a few pompous individuals, it's more understandable. More deeply affecting than Hellman's shocking tantrums and relentless egomania are Mahoney's recollections of her own childhood. These describe the heartrending struggle of a caring, devoted child for a hopelessly dysfunctional mother. Her memories, reflecting on how Nora Mahoney's awful desperation was countered by her wit, humanity and passion, create a telling juxtaposition with the detestable self-absorption and pettiness of the sniping, spoiled Hellman. First serial to Vanity Fair and Elle.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (November 3, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385477937
• ISBN-13: 978-0385477932
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,521,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant! Read it for Rosemary and her Mom, not Lillian H, July 15, 2005

By 

Kevin McNichol (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman (Paperback)

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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a witty expose, January 28, 2000

By 

Older Mom - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman (Paperback)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece of language and obsrevation., January 28, 1999

By 

[e-mail] Jack Peters (Boston MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Likely Story: One summer with Lillian Hellman (Hardcover)

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.