'Dreadful' would be more apt …

… Book Review: A Difficult Woman - WSJ.com.

Ms. Kessler-Harris claims that American anti-communists waged campaigns "filled with hyperbole and outright lies." But it was the Stalinists, Hellman included, who made falsehood a core principle. Her penchant for fantastical tales prompted Mary McCarthy's acid comment that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " The story of Hellman's friendship with "Julia," an Austrian working in the anti-fascist resistance whom she supposedly assisted, was put forward in Hellman's memoir "Pentimento" (1973) and made into a Hollywood film. The story, it turned out, was cribbed from an acquaintance. (The film's director would later denounce Hellman as a "phony.")