A Likely Story: One Summer With Lillian Hellman

Rating:
Summary: very good read
Review: A Likely Story, is about a seventeen year old girl, who's hopes and dreams are to spend a summer of fun & friendship with Lillian Hellman, in hopes that greatness would rub off on her.

Rosemary was 17 when she wrote to Lillian Hellman, asking for a part-time summer job. To her surprise, Lillian hired her as a part-time live-in housekeeper, which became more than part-time. When Rosemary applied for the job, employment was the farthest thing from her mind. Rosemary was really only thinking of herself. What she really planned was to read, write, and becoming great friends with Lillian Hellman. But, Lillian had other ideas for Rosemary. And what Rosemary got was something else indeed.

This book is about the innocence's of a 17 year-old girl, her touch with reality and her painful coming of age. At times it's heart breaking to read, other times it is uproariously funny. Rosemary Mahoney makes you feel as if you are her, in her shoes, living her experiences, and feeling her emotions.

It's a good read for those times when you don't want to concentrate on a story line or try to solve a plot. Everything you need is right there for you. I hope you like it. I did.

Pam Stone back to the top

Rating:
Summary: Well-described about Mahoney herself
Review: A Likely Story, is about a seventeen year old girl, who's hopes and dreams are to spend a summer of fun & friendship with Lillian Hellman, in hopes that greatness would rub off on her.

Rosemary was 17 when she wrote to Lillian Hellman, asking for a part-time summer job. To her surprise, Lillian hired her as a part-time live-in housekeeper, which became more than part-time. When Rosemary applied for the job, employment was the farthest thing from her mind. Rosemary was really only thinking of herself. What she really planned was to read, write, and becoming great friends with Lillian Hellman. But, Lillian had other ideas for Rosemary. And what Rosemary got was something else indeed.

This book is about the innocence's of a 17 year-old girl, her touch with reality and her painful coming of age. At times it's heart breaking to read, other times it is uproariously funny. Rosemary Mahoney makes you feel as if you are her, in her shoes, living her experiences, and feeling her emotions.

It's a good read for those times when you don't want to concentrate on a story line or try to solve a plot. Everything you need is right there for you. I hope you like it. I did.

Pam Stone back to the top

Rating:
Summary: Good Mom, Bad Mom, Lily Dearest
Review: First of all, this was a super-entertaining book and very good for a starry-eyed writer to read; bursts a necessary bubble. I've heard such tales before, but I needed another shot of reality, if only to protect my idols from ME!

At the risk of irritating the obviously sensitive author (a mini-Miss-Lily?) my take on her experience is that she couldn't get mad at her wise and loving mother for being an alcoholic and polio victim who Rosemary felt she had to protect and constantly save from disaster. She was needed as a caretaker and her mother was so obviously debilitated and yet trying so hard to do a good, if exhausting job herself. Also, Rosemary had been abandoned by her father and had obviously been lied to about that by her mother. So how could she rebel against such a saintly, sad, charming, hard-working woman, the only true source of love in her life?

O.K. Along comes Lillian Hellman - the perfect Mommie from Hell for a seventeen-year-old in need of someone or something to hate, hate, hate. They were made for each other. I loved them both in this vivid, hilarious, heartbreaking and compulsively readable story. Thanks to the author for many hours of enjoyment - I read half the book aloud to my husband, also a writer.

PS - Opening descriptions of Vineyard locals, especially the grocery crew, are adorable.

Rating:
Summary: Well-described about Mahoney herself
Review: If you're interested in Mahoney herself, this must be good-read. You will understand some part of her own life and character. However, the relationship between Mahoney and Hellman was too little to describe well about LH.

If you like to know more about Lillian Hellman, I'd recommend you to read "Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman" written by Peter Feibleman.

Rating:
Summary: Why writing degrees can be a writer's worst enemy
Review: Rosemary Mahoney has definite talents as a writer: she has a good eye, she's well-read, and she has mastered the elements of the English sentence. On the other hand, she has not put her training behind her. This is an account of a summer she spent with Lillan Hellman. It should have been a great story; instead, Mahoney seems to have tried to make it great writing. Too often she abandons the story to show us how well she can capture an image in prose. Too often she gives us minute details that exist of themselves rather than help illuminate the narrative. Even with these faults, I read the book to the end, because Mahoney's training left just enough of the story-teller intact to keep me interested. Kids, if you want to be a writer, don't take graduate courses in writing unless you are sure enough of yourself to sift the useful from the bs. Writing is a means; it is not an end.

Rating:
Summary: Much more than a memoir, a powerful coming of age story.
Review: Rosemary Mahoney's, A Likely Story, about the harrowing summer the author spent working for playwright Lillian Hellman on Martha's Vineyard, is in a totally different league from the avalanche of earnest "memoirs" that clutter the new and noteworthy book tables at megastores these days. Mahoney doesn't serve up the usual soul baring on the way to self healing that ends up making you feel like you just sat in on someone's (appropriately sanitized) therapy sessions, but rather the heart-wrenching and hilarious truth about being seventeen.

Mahoney knows that to be any good, a story must entertain and entertain this one does, with a parade of meticulously observed and remembered scenes that has you licking your chops for more, but the true brilliance of A Likely Story lies in its voice. Mahoney doesn't philosophize about the events of that long past summer from the vantage point of a now much-the-wiser adult; she gives her reader more credit and more fun than that, flinging us into the middle of those events, literally wrapping us in the skin of her seventeen year old self.

Whether caught in a vertiginous exchange with the tyrannical Hellman, serving dinner to Hellman's laughably insecure celebrity guests, or slowly realizing the worthiness of her own mother on a rainy afternoon in Vineyard Haven, Mahoney never slips out of character. We see though her eyes, think with her mind and feel with her heart.

In the recreation of the teenager she once was, Rosemary Mahoney has given us a character that stands beside Salinger's Holden Caufield -- a lonely, wonderfully funny and sad adolescent, caught between innocence and experience by a true exercise of literary art.

Rating:
Summary: Self-absorbed whiner
Review: There is no way on this website to contact ms. Mahoney. I am the marketing director of the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, ma. and we are producing TOYS IN THE ATTIC July 11-23/ I very much wish to contact the author concerning marketing possibilities. Please have her e-mail me at [e-mail]. Many thanks, Eileen Pierce, BTF

Rating:
Summary: Good Mom, Bad Mom, Lily Dearest
Review: This delightfully written memoir of disappointed youth harassed by vindictive old age is well worth the read. I can easily see Hellman as the woman about whom Mary McCarthy said, "Everthing that woman says is a lie, including 'and' and 'but.'" Mahoney's gimlet-eyed descriptions of Hellman's eccentricities and her lyrical depiction of the island are a pleasure to read.

Rating:
Summary: One of Our Best Descriptive Writers
Review: When I picked up this book I didn't even know who Lillian Hellman was, but I was eager to read a "horror" story about how awful she was to poor Rosemary Mahoney. Through the first half of the book I was wondering when the bad stuff would start to happen and I only read the second half because I was hoping Lillian would hit Rosemary upside the head with something! Rosemary Mahoney was obviously a spoiled brat of a child if she expected to be hired to work somewhere and then not be expected to actually work! And then when Lillian enforced her rules - albeit strict rules - she suddenly became a "monster." Since reading this book, I've learned more about Lillian Hellman and I've come to quite like her. Yes, she was eccentric, difficult, paranoid, but she was not a monster and Rosemary Mahoney was not treated cruelly. I hope that in writing this book, Mahoney got out all her bitterness and can finally stop sulking!