The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.

In her writings Mary MacLane compared herself to another frank young memoirist Marie Bashkirtseff who died a few years after MacLane was born and H. ". Mary MacLane (May 1 1881 — August 1929) was a controversial Canadian-born American writer whose frank memoirs helped uMary MacLaner in the confessional style of autobiographical writing.