A Likely Story; One Summer With Lillian Hellman

“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.”

REVIEWS

“ . . . [an] endlessly fascinating book . . . It was Hellman's self-destructive misjudgment to hire a valet with a fierce sense of morality, an exquisite eye for detail, a sharp eye for character, a fanciful way with words and a long memory. And Mahoney's willingness to share blame for the misalliance makes her portrait all the more absorbing and damning.” --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times Book Review

"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." -- Frances Kiernan, The New York Observer

"This brave and heart wrenching book is the final evidence that, as far as writers go, Mahoney is the real thing." --Newsday

“A Likely Story has the concentrated power of a brilliantly realized novella . . . ‘Never meet your heroes,’ might be its motto. Though Rosemary Mahoney pulls no punches in her rendering of Lillian Hellman, she is equally honest in portraying the judgmental, bratty powerlessness of adolescence. Irresistibly readable, scandalously interesting, its true subject is not fame but shame, and its salutary role in the formation of a complex self.” --Philip Lopate, author of Potrait of My Body.

“Heartbreaking and hilarous, Mahoney’s sharp prose illuminates this memoir of lost innocence and fallen idols.” --Minneapolis Star Tribune What makes A Likely Story so remarkable--along with the 1993 Whoredom in Kimmage and Mahoney’s first memoir, The Early Arrival of Dreams, . . . is the writing. At its worst, it is engaging, at its best it invites comparison with another contemporary Irish American, Frank McCourt . . .” --The Providence Journal

“A Likely Story is a cautionary tale about adoration and celebrity from one of our more gifted journalists--each scene literally leaps off the page, fraught with emotion recollected not entirely in tranquillity.” --Amazon.com

“The tribulations suffered by a 17-year-old girl working for a stubborn, acerbic 73-year-old woman may sound like a potential whine-fest. But when the narrator is a writer as gifted as Mahoney, and the older woman is none other than Lillian Hellman, the story becomes a compelling chronicle not only of an intergenerational combat of will and manners, but also of that terrible, wavering period of late adolescence when nothing is certain, and frustrations are legion.” --Publisher’s Weekly