Mary McCarthy enjoyed an indulgent, idyllic childhood until 1918, when the terrible national influenza epidemic led to the death of her parents. Hoping to keep the children out of Protestant hands, her Catholic grandparents in Minneapolis sent Mary and her three brothers to live with relatives, cruel and repressive Dickensian figures who beat them. Eventually Mary was sent to convent school in Seattle, where she struggled with issues of faith and morality, and then Episcopalian seminary, where she discovered the Latin classics and began her transition from girlhood to adolescence. In telling this extraordinary tale, McCarthy drew on her skill as a novelist to relate a unique early life with irony, humor, and devastating honesty.