Undisguised Alter Ego: Mary McCarthy’s Autofictional Career
Published in Life Writing, 2020
Abstract
Career construction theory offers substantial new insights about Mary McCarthy and her generation of U.S. literary authors. While some commentators have noted that McCarthy’s profession bears on the interpretation of her numerous self-representations, this concern has been understood primarily as an intensification of the inherent reflexivity of life-writing. This essay goes further, following Hywel Dix (2018a) in constructing the object of literary interpretation in two new ways: as the career in addition to the work, and as the career as represented within the work. In keeping, this essay proposes that Mary McCarthy’s entire oeuvre—including her autobiographical novels—might be considered first as life writing, then as a written life. In addition, because her work explored the reading and writing experiences that stand at the boundary between fiction and autobiography, McCarthy’s oeuvre may be linked to a body of writing in English that has begun to be described as ‘autofiction’. As Worthington (2017) has argued, contemporary autofictions offer a response to the emergence of ‘post-truth’ as a demagogic dissemination of the insights of postmodernism. As autofiction becomes a more prominent dimension of the contemporary literary scene—and as ‘post-truth’ erodes norms around the world—Mary McCarthy’s work should be moving back into focus.