Her maternal grandmother, Augusta Morganstern Preston, was a beautiful Jewish woman from San Francisco. Her maternal grandfather, Harold Preston, was a Seattle lawyer whose Protestant ancestors came from New England. Her paternal grandparents were wealthy Irish Catholics from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where they operated a grain elevator business. Therese Preston was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism after marrying Roy McCarthy, a man ten years her senior and a victim of progressive heart disease. The conflicts between the reactionary Catholicism of the McCarthys and the more humane Protestantism of the Prestons, as well as the Jewish heritage of her maternal grandmother, emerge as significant motifs in McCarthy's later writings. When both her parents died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918, Mary's paternal grandparents assumed the guardianship of the children and placed them in the care of a great aunt, Margaret, and her stern, authoritarian husband, Meyers Shriver. The barren conditions under which Mary and her brothers were forced to live and the harsh treatment they received are vividly recalled in
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). Rigidly anti-Protestant, McCarthy's grandmother followed the doctrines of Catholicism in a narrow, smug fashion and generally ignored the fact that the McCarthy children lived an existence where not only were all pleasures denied them, but most of life's ordinary comforts as well.
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