How I Grew by Mary McCarthy. 1987 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, first edition, 278 pages. McCarthy was a prolific critic, memoirist, and novelist, known for her cutting wit and confident takedowns, culminating in a televised interview where she called Lillian Hellman a "dishonest writer," which led to a defamation lawsuit. Her work often skewered the milieu in which she ran, intellectual literary circles, and included thinly disguised characters based on her friends and acquaintances. Her most famous novel The Group, was a bestseller and turned into a film, yet this too alienated some friends. How I Grew is an autobiography of McCarthy's life from age 13 to her early 20s. The New York Times had this to say at the time: "Such a study of memory - how it works, or pretends to work, or simply decides to take the day off -could only have been undertaken by someone on fire for exact truth, and it amply justifies Miss McCarthy's method. The small price we pay is that the laser beam never seems to go off."

Condition: Jacket in good condition, chips and wear to the edges, book in VG condition

"But I am digressing in the middle of a digression, piling Ossa on Pelion, we Latinists would say."