How I Grew is an autobiography of critic Mary McCarthy, and it fills me with a sense of deja vu. McCarthy spent her young formative years in Seattle, as did I. She was raised in the hilly Madrona District, as was I. Her Garfield High School experiences sometimes matched mine at the same school. Her budding sexual stumbles while a student at Tacoma’s Annie Wright Seminary reminded me of my own adolescent blunders while attending dances at that seminary.
If you’re curious about Seattle’s 1920s environs, what people did, what they read, memorable summers at Lake Crescent and the Olympic Peninsula, Cornish School, and an awakening artist’s mind, you will want to read How I Grew.
Later author of Cast a Cold Eye, The Group, Cannibals and Missionaries, among other books, Mary McCarthy left Seattle in the 1930s but frequently returned to its streets and parks in her writing. For example, her autobiographical book, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, tartly describes a convent upbringing in Seattle in a barbed and entertaining memoir. Several Roman Catholic acquaintances of those days have never forgiven McCarthy for her candid words.
For example, in How I Grew she names names, and several individuals will still be familiar to local readers. As a native and student of the Pacific Northwest I was surprised to learn a number of unimportant but fascinating things from McCarthy. For example, did you know there are “hidden falls” above Marymere Falls near Lake Crescent?
Another tale of memory by McCarthy reveals the former trolley turn-a-round at 34th Avenue and East Union Street, a crossroads enroute to Lake Washington’s Madrona Park or (in reverse) to downtown. This same neighborhood shelters St. Theresa’s small but handsome Roman Catholic Church, next to one of the city’s busiest Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, and her grandparent Prestons’ house where Mary lived.
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Dear Junius,
Thank you for this post. I am presently reading “The World She Edited”, the excellent new biography of Katharine S. White, longtime editor for The New Yorker. White and McCarthy were professional colleagues and became good friends. This new biography has shown me how central McCarthy was to America’s mid-century literary world. I had known McCarthy was raised – and definitely Catholic – in Seattle. You have now inspired me to read “How I Grew.”.