mary mccarthy suffered really badly. when news of the flu began, mary's about 9 years old, and her folks decided rightly to go back home to i think it was minneapolis. we're going to go back to the midwest anyway. from seattle. and her father was a bit of a waste. he was a playboy. he was always broke. if on -- on the train they soon became sick, and the conductor wanted to throw them off the train at a station in the middle of the prairie. so to mary's astonishment, her father pulled a gun on the conductor, and he sort of -- strongest moment ever of his life, he said, well, i'd like to see you try. but they died. and mary's grandparents were there to meet her at the station when the train arrived. she e never saw her parents again, and she was brought up by a very cold, distant relative. i'm sure they were just trying to do their best, but she said it changed the course of her life. he said if she'd stayed in seattle -- she said if she'd stayed in seattle, she'd have married a lawyer, she'd have belonged to a book club,

mccarthy who also was this incredibly fierce, successful, almost intimidating public figure in her life but in her relationship with critic edmund wilson she talks about how he would humiliate her in all these ways in front of her friends and she would have to ask him for a nickel to make a telephone call. i kind of look at these different biographies as a way of thinking about how complicated this idea, that gap between theory and life, the question of who you are to the outside world and who you are on the average day, night, when you're just sitting at home. i tried not to -- there is that scene where i talk about wanting to throw the book across the room, i feel that same frustration, what about your theory? i feel that frustration too and it is tempting to kind of judge or say these relationships are not healthy. there are all kinds of ways that we get sucked into this judgment of women when they act this way. i didn't want to do that in this book and i didn't want to take a moral stand or say this is good or bad or anything about it but just to look at it, how those contradictions