Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the 1920s, when she was orphaned into a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion.

There was her Catholic grandmother who combined piousness with pugnacity, and her veiled Jewish grandmother who mourned the disastrous effects of a face-lift; there was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul, and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil, and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy ‘mouth-breathing’. ‘Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs,’ Mary McCarthy says, ‘I have wished that I were writing fiction.’ But these were the people, along with the Ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who inspired her engaging perception, her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous, and her witty, novelist’s imagination.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a major work by one of the leading American intellectuals of the twentieth century – witty, scathing, piercingly insightful and stylishly written.