Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

“This is a search for reality through a maze of illusions and fantasy and dreams, ultimately asserting in the words of Calderon: ‘Life is a dream.’“—Anaïs Nin

A descendent of Brigham Young, Marguerite Young was born in Indiana in 1909 and spent most of her life in Greenwich Village, where she associated with writers like Richard Wright, Carson McCullers Truman Capote, and Gertrude Stein. In addition to Miss MacIntosh, My Darling she published two works of poetry, a work of nonfiction (Angel in the Forest), a collection of essays and stories (Inviting the Muses) and Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, which was published posthumously.

Meghan O’Gieblyn writes essays, features, and criticism for Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, n+1, The Point, The Baffler, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times, and other publications. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and the 2023 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her essays have been included in The Best American Essays and The Contemporary American Essay anthologies. She is the author of Interior States, which won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction, and God, Human, Animal, Machine.