When lit star Mary McCarthy, future author of the incendiary The Group, about her post-Vassar years, was six years old, her uncle, the family's success story, left for Seattle in 1918 to oversee their move to Minneapolis after the onset of the Spanish flu pandemic. Her mother, brother, future actor Kevin and the two other siblings and her father were likely already sick. Instead of sheltering in place, they evacuated first to her grandmother's house since no hospital beds were available, then to a hotel. They boarded the train and one by one were carried off, ill or near death in the case of her parents. McCarthy became an 'orphan', and she recounted this defining experience in her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, one of the first and best memoirs in which she doubts her own memory. It's something to read now when all of our memories will surely be compromised by this insidious, stealth Covid 19 disease. What is the truth?