Undercover reading

This week Robert Gottlieb posted this piece, entitled Girls before 'Girls' on the New Yorker blog, about Rona Jaffe's 1958 novel The Best of Everything. I'll certainly put that on my reading list, as it's 'about that old story of three, or four, or five very young women land up in New York, trying to find their way'.

It made me think of my own first encounter with that timeless theme: Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel The Group. Which is about, well, read it yourself, Penguin has practically printed the whole book on the cover. It is this edition that I found on my parents' bookshelves, aged eleven, and took upstairs to my bedroom. It must've been the interior decor and the cooking that triggered me.
My dad was slightly dismayed when he passed my bedroom door and saw me reading it in bed, but he let me. Still, I read on under the covers, because I was a little ashamed to be caught with such adult reading material. And adult it was.

It wasn't the sex, really, though that was pretty explicit. But those girls from the thirties being seduced by boho alcoholic artists or raped by Norwegian ski jumpers were just as innocent as my eleven year old self, so that part of the book worked for me. Big time, even. Never had I read anything like that before, and certainly not from a woman's perspective. I did have a few sleepless nights trying to figure out what exactly a diaphragm was and where it went. I still haven't reached any definite conclusions. 

I read on under the covers, because I was a little ashamed to be caught with such adult reading material

The part of the book that felt so adult to me was everything else in those women's lives. The politics (and there was a lot of that, much more than in Girls), the psycho-analysis, the breastfeeding, the bitchyness, the marriages falling apart, and just the general air of bitterness and disillusionment that set in immediately after those girls graduated. This novel was pretty autobiographical, apparently, Mary McCarthy herself graduated from Vassar in '33. But it's very clear that she wrote it many years later, after there was time for life to happen and bitterness to set in. 

 I loved The Group so much  that I reread it often, growing up, but never thought to discuss it with anyone. It was such a strange old book, who would even like it? When I left home and my parents' bookshelves I forgot about it entirely. Then last year, thanks to Mad Men, it became popular again. It even got reissued here in the Netherlands. And when I attended the book launch, suddenly there were all these other women who loved The Group too! It was strange to find out they existed, it had been such a private book for me. Many of them were a lot older than I am, and had read the book when it first came out, in the sixties, when they were young women themselves. I wonder if Girls will make a similar comeback in forty years time. Hope so. 

Since I realized there were other people out there who liked The Group, I have been trying to force all my friends to read it. I don't think any of them have, so far. Maybe you will? It's worth it, I promise. And maybe, if you find out something about that diaphragm, you can let me know.