Memories of a Catholic GIrlhood

McCarthy's 1957 memoir of her first dozen or so years just gets better every time I reread it. There's plenty of drama—she was orphaned, maltreated, and rescued—but the real thrill comes from her brilliantly sharp portraits (somehow both ruthless and kind) of everyone around her, not least of herself. And to boot, it is one of the great Seattle books, a rare glimpse (continued in her sequel, How I Grew) of our "near-pioneer" city in the '20s and what it was like for an ambitious young woman to come of age there.