"The temptation to invent has been very strong, particularly where recollection is hazy and I remember the substance of an event but not the details . . . Then there are cases where I am not sure myself whether I am making something up. I think I remember, but I am not positive." These lines are in Mary McCarthy's introduction to her famous book, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which was originally published back in 1957, and was perhaps the original work of what we now know as "faction". The essence is true, but the writer, from the distance of time, has in part rewritten the past, as Frank McCourt was to do much later in his memoirs. McCarthy mulls self-consciously over several passages throughout the book, wondering if what she has written is true. Anyone in Ireland who has had a Catholic girlhood - or boyhood - will be interested in comparing notes with Mary McCarthy's 1920s upbringing in America. Orphaned at an early age, McCarthy was raised by a clatter of grannies and eccentric aunts and uncles, and educated by the nuns of the Sacred Heart - the same order which provided Antonia White with her factional account of convent boarding school, the classic Frost in May.
