Against Consolation

Reading Mary McCarthy on memory, Catholicism, and the discipline of not lying to yourself

There is something bracing about ending the year with a woman who refuses consolation.

I finished my reading year, not with softness or surrender, but with Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, first published in 1957, and still capable of making you sit up straighter, sharpen your pencil, and question your own reliability as a narrator. Mary McCarthy does not soothe. She interrogates. She cross-examines herself like a hostile witness and invites you to do the same.

This is not a memoir in the cosy, confessional sense. There is no healing arc. No redemptive bow. What McCarthy offers instead is something far more unsettling and far more interesting: a sustained meditation on memory, deceit, belief, and the small violences done by institutions that claim moral authority. Catholicism is the framework here, but childhood itself is the real subject, with all its distortions, loyalties, fantasies, and betrayals.

McCarthy famously prefaces the book by announcing that much of what follows may be untrue. Or at least unreliable. She dismantles her own memories as she recounts them, interrupting herself, correcting, doubting, footnoting her own past. This is not memoir as testimony. It is memoir as intellectual inquiry. Memory not as sacred archive, but as slippery, self-serving fiction.

And it is thrilling.

What she remembers of her Catholic girlhood is not piety but power. The Church looms not as spiritual refuge but as a totalising system, shaping behaviour, guilt, obedience, and silence. Orphaned young, shuttled between relatives, McCarthy grows up inside a world where authority is unquestioned and interior life is suspect. Sin is ever-present. Desire is dangerous. Obedience is rewarded. Questions are not.

Yet what makes the book endure is not its critique of Catholicism per se, but McCarthy’s ferocious honesty about herself. She is not the noble child resisting oppression. She is vain, theatrical, imaginative, occasionally cruel. She lies. She performs. She wants attention. She wants to be special. She wants to be right. She does not flatter her younger self, and in doing so she earns our trust.

Reading this as a woman who was also raised Catholic, I felt the familiar tightening in the chest. The peculiar combination of ritual and repression. The theatricality of guilt. The way confession teaches you to narrate yourself badly. But McCarthy is not writing a trauma memoir. She is writing about how systems of belief shape narrative itself. How we learn which versions of ourselves are permitted to exist.

What astonishes is how modern this feels. The self-consciousness. The awareness of performance. The refusal of a clean moral stance. McCarthy understands that memory is not a recovery project but a construction site. She writes not to confess but to examine. To take apart the machinery of belief and identity and see how it worked.

The introduction by Colm Tóibín is a quiet masterclass in attentiveness. Tóibín does not attempt to soften McCarthy or excuse her sharpness. He situates her instead among a lineage of women who wrote themselves into intellectual seriousness at a time when female authority was deeply suspect. He understands that McCarthy’s refusal of sentimentality is not coldness but discipline. A commitment to clarity over comfort.

He also notes something crucial: McCarthy’s insistence on accuracy is paradoxical, because she knows accuracy is impossible. What matters is not factual precision but intellectual honesty. Saying: this is how I remember it, and this is why that memory might be compromised. It is an ethics of uncertainty. A radical one.

There is, of course, pleasure here too. McCarthy is dry, witty, exacting. She has a talent for skewering pomposity and exposing hypocrisy with a single well-aimed sentence. Her prose is elegant without being decorative. Controlled without being bloodless. She writes like someone who expects her reader to keep up.

And perhaps that is why this feels like such a fitting book to close the year with. It does not offer solace. It offers seriousness. It asks what we believe about our own pasts, and why. It reminds us that identity is not discovered but narrated, and that narration is always a political act.

In an age of therapeutic oversharing and algorithmic vulnerability, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood feels almost subversive in its restraint. McCarthy does not ask for sympathy. She does not centre pain as proof of virtue. She does not tidy herself up for our comfort. She simply thinks, relentlessly, on the page.

I closed the book feeling steadier, not soothed. Less certain, but more alert. Which is, I think, exactly what good books should do.

Not absolution. Not confession. But attention.

That will do for a year.

Go Lightly,

Sabina xx