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Zusatztext "An endlessly fascinating book...." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times "Mahoney's characterizations are masterful. She impeccably re-creates Hellman's friends and the emotions they summoned up in her younger self." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review "Rosemary Mahoney...brings to her memoir the shaping and insight and sheer good writing we expect from a work of fiction." -- The New York Observer "This brave and heartwrenching book is the final evidence that, as far as writers go, Mahoney is the real thing." -- Newsday Informationen zum Autor Rosemary Mahoney is the author of The Early Arrival of Dreams , an account of teaching in China that was a New York Times Notable Book in 1990, and Whoredom in Kimmage , a National Book Critics' Circle finalist in 1993. She won the Charles E. Horman Prize for Fiction Writing as an undergraduate at Harvard and is also the recipient of a Whiting Writing Award. She lives in New York City. Klappentext Now in paperback--from the author of the acclaimed Whoredom in Kimmage , a moving, controversial, and supremely intelligent memoir of a bright and vulnerable teenager's hellish summer job. In 1978, Rosemary Mahoney, an aspiring young writer of seventeen, wrote her personal idol Lillian Hellman inquiring whether the famed woman of American letters might need domestic help for the summer. When Hellman responded affirmatively, Mahoney imagined an idyll on Martha's Vineyard of mentoring and friendship. But in reality Mahoney's summer unfolded into an exquisite and grueling exercise in humiliation at the hands of the acerbic Hellman and her retinue of celebrated acquaintances. By turns heartbreaking and uproariously funny, A Likely Story portrays the coming-of-age of a brilliant and troubled young woman--a universal tale of illusions shattered and an object lesson in the often misdirected search for heroes. Leseprobe I was in Los Angeles when I learned that Lillian Hellman had died. It was the summer of 1984; I was twenty-three. I was staying with my sister Elizabeth in her loft apartment in an old building near LA's financial district. In exchange for the mattress my sister had given me to sleep on for six weeks, I had offered to help her strip decades' worth of heavy gray paint from the loft's enormous window frames, to uncover the soft, copper-colored oak we knew was buried beneath the paint. We used a caustic stripping agent, a paintbrush, and two scarred putty knives for the job. I worked in old-fashioned Chinese cotton underwear I'd bought in nearby Chinatown--the underwear was light and cool against the bitter brown sunlight that pressed all afternoon through the picture-paned windows. We protected the floor with back issues of the New York Times, which we'd gotten from an upstairs neighbor. Despite the powerful burning chemicals, the heat, and the filth that covered the aged wood, the work was pleasantly meditative; like pot washing or silver polishing, it inspired a trancelike physical rhythm and a spiral of connected thought. I worked for hours with slack-faced steadiness, my mind softly swinging from thought to thought like a simple pendulum, buffing pebbles of ideas in my head as I scraped at the curdling paint in long, smooth strokes. Into this relaxed state crashed the headline under my toe when I bent to wipe a bubble of Strypeeze from my sneaker: LILLIAN HELLMAN, PLAYWRIGHT, AUTHOR, AND REBEL, DIES AT 79. Seeing these words was like discovering that the cool, slippery object you've crushed beneath your bare foot in the garden is a large pus-colored slug. I recoiled instinctively and my face tightened and my free hand flew up to cover my mouth. For several years I had supposed that Lillian Hellman was already dead, perhaps because for years I had been killing her off in my imagination. But the newspaper was o...
