Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

McCarthy's memoir has long been celebrated (for good reason) for its tartly intelligent portrait of a smart young girl's loss of faith, and of the miserable years she spent with her cruel great uncle after her parents died of the flu. But what I love most about it (and its sequel, How I Grew), and what I remember most vividly, are its snapshots of Seattle in the '20s and '30s: her awareness of what it means to be an ambitious girl in the provincial West, and most particularly, her heady, sensory descriptions of her kind-but-distant grandmother and the gruffly flamboyant production she made of her daily shopping excursions to Frederick's department store downtown.