The Art of Memoir
By Mary Karr
4.5/5
()
About this ebook
Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.
For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black belt sinner,” providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre.
Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers’ experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr’s own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told— and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.
Joining such classics as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today’s most popular literary forms—a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft.
Mary Karr
Mary Karr is the author of three award-winning, bestselling memoirs: The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit, as well as The Art of Memoir, also a New York Times bestseller. She received Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships for poetry and is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.
Read more from Mary Karr
Lit: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Now Go Out There: (and Get Curious) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
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Reviews for The Art of Memoir
24 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Two memoirs. One poetry book. One writing book. Yes, it was a Mary Karr week. My Mary Karr reading frenzy all started quite innocently. I took a writing class last summer at Inprint in Houston. Our teacher told us Mary Karr was coming to Houston in September. I spontaneously decided to buy a ticket, vaguely remembering that I'd read her first memoir, Liar's Club, back twenty years ago or so. When the date of Karr's reading approached, I was exhausted by all the beginning-of-the-year stuff we teachers experience but I remembered a book was included in the price of the reading, and I didn't want to miss out on picking up that book. So I reluctantly decided to go. When I googled the address of the reading, I was surprised to see that it was being held in a church. Must not have been able to book the Wortham for that night, I thought. I was wrong. It was no accident that Mary Karr was at Christ Church Cathedral, an Episcopal Church in downtown Houston, built in 1839; all her readings were being held in churches. I was intrigued. An author in a church. Imagine that. Mary Karr was fascinating. "I was a strange child," she told her audience at the reading. "I was not a happy child. But there was something about reading memoirs that made me feel less lonely." Karr shared her new book, The Art of Memoir, and suggested that through our stories we manufacture a self. "Writing a memoir is like knocking yourself out with your own fist," she told us. All her books, Karr explained, could be summed up: "I am sad. The end." In her life, Karr survived her alcoholic and dysfunctional parents to become an alcoholic and dysfunctional parent herself. And somehow she broke free of all that, mysteriously embracing both writing and the Catholic Church. Mary Karr is a little older, a little less functional Texas-rooted me. Like me, she has both the redneck-storytelling people and the salvation-through-reading people in her family tree. That was enough. I raced home from the reading and put everything I could find of Mary Karr's on hold at the library. I was amazed to find that not only were all three of her memoirs at the library, but that I could also check out and read one of her books of poetry. I'll just tell you that her books are mostly "I am sad." But, happily, there is a little more there before "The end." Beautiful writing. Sad stories. And redemption. Mary Karr.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Karr is an accomplished memoirist and writing professor. Her book on the process and form of writing memoir is extremely engaging even if you are solely a reader who is not interested in writing. She reads many beautiful excerpts from some of the best memoirists throughout history as examples. If you are a writer interested in memoir, I believe that this book would be invaluable.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mary Karr examines a number of classic memoirs while listing necessary elements of memoir-writing. Technically a bit of a how-to book, this is really a set of essays on Karr favorites, and her own work, built around the how-to.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Karr's writing style is enchanting. The book started with great promise, but fizzled in the last third. Her lengthy discourse on Nabokov would have been better at 1/4 the length. Still, there are useful hints for a novice like me. Her suggestions for finding your own voice and editing (and editing, again and again) are particularly useful. I'm not so sure about her recommendations to show your memoir to the people who appear in it. And, I wish Karr had written more about how to deal with situations in your life that could be terribly embarrassing to other people. She has too few suggestions in this area. Overall, the book was worth reading. It has reinforced my determination to complete my memoir, but I can't give it more than 3 stars.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whether wanting to write your own story or learn from those who have, this is a refreshing read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5While I may have no intention of ever writing a memoir, I am a huge fan of the genre and have read at least two hundred of them over the past few years. So although I believe that Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir would be helpful to would-be memoirists, I picked it up mainly just to continue my one-way conversation with one of my favorite practitioners of the craft. And just I had hoped, Karr by devoting a substantial portion of the book to her own memories and experiences, has written much more than just another “how to write” book.The preface of The Art of Memoir speaks directly to those considering an effort in chronicling the experiences that shaped them into the people they are today but it is filled with as many words of warning as with words of encouragement. As she puts it:“Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That’s the quality I’ve found most consistently in those life-story writers I’ve met. Truth is not their enemy. It’s the bannister they grab for when feeling around on the dark cellar stairs. It’s the solution.”Karr has, of course, been writing and re-writing memoirs for a long time. She has studied her favorite memoir writers (past and present) and has figuratively disassembled their best work to see what makes it tick. For some three decades, she has taught the format and, along the way, has accumulated several thousand index cards filled with notes that she uses in the classroom. For that reason, those looking to the book for specific writing tips and techniques will not be disappointed. In truth, it seems that Karr may very well have had two specific audiences in mind when writing The Art of Memoir. If so, both audiences will be satisfied.Parts of the book are aimed at both audiences – and, I suppose, at the third potential audience that might have one foot in each of the other two audiences. I’m thinking specifically of chapters like the one titled “Dealing with Beloveds (On and Off the Page)” in which Karr grapples with the issue of revealing personal details that have the potential to embarrass or enrage those one loves the most. The chapter does end with an eleven-point list of the author’s “rules for dealing with others,” but it also shares stories about her mother’s immediate acceptance and encouragement of Karr’s previous books and her sister’s more reluctantly granted positive reaction to them. But it is the book’s Appendix, a listing of “Required Reading,” that I expect to return to often in order to root through the two hundred or so memoirs it lists for future reading choices of my own. In fact, because I have only read about ten percent of the books on the list, those six pages particularly excite me. There is something for everyone in this very fine addition to Mary Karr’s body of work.
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5TLDR: This is a wise book that tells you seriously about the practical, emotional, and social consequences of writing an honest autobiographical memoir, and how to mitigate them. If you're thinking about writing such a book, you mustn't miss it.My personal reaction to Karr's book is shaped by my peculiar history: I'm sure I'm one of the few readers who hasn't read any of her three memoirs. Instead, I came to Karr through her excellent poems. So the force of Karr's personality was unexpected. Having found her voice, she is determinedly idiosyncratic, if not iconoclastic, on nearly every page. She's a tough gal and she's set on making sure we know it. She almost dares us not to like her. That's fine; I don't have to like someone to admire them, or to learn from them. And I do like her, mostly. But I found some of her mannerisms grating. Like the way so many of her examples of great writing are on child or animal abuse. (Yes, I know her personal history.) Or her choice of fey synonyms for common words ("The Truth Contract Twixt Writer and Reader." Twixt? In truth? 'Sblood, hie thee hence, fell wordstress)! And particularly her use of the word "carnal" in blithe disregard of its modern connotations, to mean "as perceived or perceivable by the senses." She's so in love with her personal definition of "carnal" that at one point she literally refers to a map on the wall as a "carnal object."Great teacher. Great book. Irritating as hell.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Reading a memoir is a bit like stalking someone on Facebook. You might feel a little guilty but that probably won’t stop you from hungrily searching through the private parts of their life. I’m fascinated by this genre—and even hope to write a memoir someday myself—so I found The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr an incredible read. Not only is it is an excellent resource for anyone who is interested in memoir (or writing in general), it’s also funny and easy-to-read. I haven’t actually read any of Karr’s memoirs yet (gasp!) but that didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of this book.
Karr draws on her own experience and the experience of other authors to answer questions like:
Where’s the line between truth and untruth?
What do you do when your memory conflicts with a family member’s or friend’s?
How do I know if I’m ready to write a memoir?
How do I translate lived experience onto the page?
How do I find my voice?
How do I convey myself as a true-to-life character?
How do I write about a scene that’s vague in my memory? How do I remember physical details?
Karr pulls from other authors and memoirs to answer these questions and references her own work only after she's won our trust. I especially liked a chapter near the end of the book where Karr takes readers through all the pretentious voices she tried on as a young writer before landing on the voice that reflected herself most accurately. “The author of a lasting memoir manages to power past the initial defenses,” she tells us, “digging past the false self to where the truer one waits to tell the more complicated story.”
Book preview
The Art of Memoir - Mary Karr
Preface | Welcome to My Chew Toy
Don’t follow me, I’m lost,
the master said to the follower
who had a cocked pen and a yellow pad.
Stephen Dunn, Visiting the Master
This preface is a squeaky rubber chew toy I have pawed and gnawed at for years. Problem being, memoir as a genre has entered its heyday, with a massive surge in readership the past twenty years or so. But for centuries before now, it was an outsider’s art—the province of weirdos and saints, prime ministers and film stars. As a grad student thirty years back, I heard it likened to inscribing the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice. So I still feel some lingering obligation to defend it.
Partly what murders me about memoir—what I adore—is its democratic (some say ghetto-ass primitive), anybody-who’s-lived-can-write-one aspect. You can count on a memoirist being passionate about the subject. Plus its structure remains dopily episodic. Novels have intricate plots, verse has musical forms, history and biography enjoy the sheen of objective truth. In memoir, one event follows another. Birth leads to puberty leads to sex. The books are held together by happenstance, theme, and (most powerfully) the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past.
Changes in the novel have helped to jack up memoir’s audience. As fiction grew more fabulist or dystopic or hyperintellectual under the sway of Joyce and Woolf and García Márquez and Pynchon acolytes, readers thirsty for reality began imbibing memoir.
Between 2005 and 2010, Philip Gourevitch closely observed the skyrocketing of nonfiction as literature at the editorial helm of that towering literary mag the Paris Review. (Gourevitch’s classic on the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, is also a masterpiece.) Here’s an excerpt of his speech as he stepped down, likening rebukes against memoir as a lesser form to the critics who once mocked photography for lacking the originality of painting:
The past fifty years has seen an explosion of exciting new work in memoir, reportage, and the literature of fact in all forms and lengths and styles. And yet, I am afraid, there is a kind of lingering snobbery in the literary world that wants to disqualify what is broadly called nonfiction from the category of literature
—to suggest that somehow, it lacks in artistry, or imagination or invention by comparison to fiction. . . . But the nonfiction I published was every bit as good as fiction.
Youngsters may not recall the lengthy assaults against memoir from critics like William Gass* and Jonathan Yardley and James Wolcott. Their ultimately impotent campaigns put me in mind of how early novels were mocked for being mere fancies,
lacking the moral rigor of philosophy and sermons and the formal rigor of poetry.
So after fifty-plus years of reading every memoir I could track down and thirty teaching the best ones (plus getting paid to bang out three), I spent last year trying to cobble up what a physicist would call a Unified Field Theory or Theory of Everything about the form. I imagined a better me would have done this already. (A better me, says the nattering voice in my head, wouldn’t eat Oreos by the sleeve.) This better me has an alphabetized bookshelf and a mind parceled out into PowerPoint slides. She has a big fat overarching system.
In search of such a system, I found myself last winter shoving a wobbly-wheeled cart at Staples. Hours later, I lunged all snow-spackled into the house like a Labrador dragging home kill in her teeth. I got presentation easels (three), aluminum-framed slabs of corkboard (four), flip chart (one), and boo-coup color-coordinated index cards and sticky notes.
But by summer, the living room—now dubbed The War Room—resembled nothing so much as the headquarters of a serial killer task force, with cards tacked up and schematics and arrows and notes by color on the windowpanes. Index cards said stuff like: Tell about Michael Herr and skinned man!
One quoted old Saint Augustine (probably a sex addict and arguably the father of memoir circa the fifth century—no, it’s not Oprah): Give me chastity, Lord, but not yet.
I spent months watching the black cursor flicker, or with my nose in various books I wish I’d written. And I resisted the urge to slink off to hide under the bed like a dog with a bad haircut.
As with everything I’ve ever written, I start out paralyzed by fear of failure. The tarantula ego—starving to be shored up by praise—tries to scare me away from saying simply whatever small, true thing is standing in line for me to say.
Ts’ok. That’s why the Lord in infinite wisdom gave us delete keys.
Recently, a friend I teach with talked me down off the ledge about this project by reminding me that I’ve spent decades talking with joy to students about memoir. What I really bring to the classroom is having cherished the form as long and as hard as anybody. In 1965 I wrote, When I grow up, I will write ½ poetry and ½ autobiography.
And as a strange child reading the sagas of Helen Keller and Maya Angelou, I just felt less lonely. In some animistic way, I believed they were talking (as my toddler son once said of the infuriatingly saccharine Mr. Rogers) only to me.
A first-person coming-of-age story, putatively true, never failed to give the child me hope that I could someday grow up and get out of the mess I was in—which was reading hours per day in a state of socially sanctioned disassociation to try and fence myself off from the chaos of my less-than-ideal household. If Angelou, born black in pre–civil rights Arkansas, and poor blind/deaf Keller each made it outta their own private hells to become that most exalted of creatures—a writer—maybe I could too. Every memoirist had lived to tell the tale, and that survival usually geezed me with hope as if with a hypodermic. A comparable-sounding novel just couldn’t infuse me the same way.
However often fiction has served as a fig leaf for lived, remembered experience, the form doesn’t promise veracity of event. As I turn a novel’s pages, a first-person narrator may seduce me, but the fact that it’s all made up and not actually outlived oddly keeps me from drawing courage outside the book’s dream. The deep, mysterious sense of identification with a memoirist who’s confessed her past just doesn’t translate to a novelist I love, however deliciously written the work.
I’m embarrassed to confess this, because it sounds so naive—identifying
with someone I’ve never met, a peddler of pages who profits from my buying her act. I sound like the guy at a strip club who thinks the dancers really fancy him.
I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them. In this, memoir purports to grow more organically from lived experience. When I asked a class of undergrads what they liked about memoir, I heard them echo the no-doubt-naive sentiment that they drew hope from the mere fact of a writer living past a bad juncture to report on it. It’s a miracle he even survived!
was written on many papers. The telling has some magic power for them, as it does for me. Tell it,
the soldiers in Vietnam begged Michael Herr, and in Dispatches, he told it.
This confidence of mine in most memoirs’ veracity is viewed as gullible, I know. Of course, there’s artifice to the relationship between any writer and her reader. Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It’s not just raw reportage flung splat on the page. Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you’re shaping the past’s meaning. Plus, memoir uses novelistic devices like cobbling together dialogue you failed to record at the time. To concoct a distinctive voice, you often have to do a poet’s lapidary work. And the good ones reward study. You’re making an experience for a reader, a show that conjures your past—inside and out—with enough lucidity that a reader gets way more than just the brief flash of titillation. You owe a long journey, and most of all, you owe all the truth you can wheedle out of yourself. So while it is a shaped experience, the best ones come from the soul of a human unit oddly compelled to root out the past’s truth for his own deeply felt reasons.
In fact, every memoirist I know seems doomed to explore the past in an often-agonized death march down the pages. If you met them all at a cocktail party, they’d strike you as frank and upfront, more curious about the past than defensive about their own versions.
Think of that family meal we’ve all had when each person’s colliding version of an event ricochets off every other. You weren’t even born when that happened. At such a meal, I may defend my own account like a wolf her turf, but lying awake later, I’ll often feel the creeping suspicion I’m wrong.
Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That’s the quality I’ve found most consistently in those life-story writers I’ve met. Truth is not their enemy. It’s the bannister they grab for when feeling around on the dark cellar stairs. It’s the solution.
Wow, there it is, my long-lost theory, stolen obviously from the Delphic oracle with her pesky, near-impossible demand to know thyself.
A curious mind probing for truth may well set your scribbling ass free. A fierce urge to try reexperiencing your own mind and body and throbbing heart alive inside the most vivid stories from your past is step one. (No doubt if you weren’t haunted by those stories, you wouldn’t waste your time trying to write it.) Then you just have to tell it, right? The second-hardest part. I’ve inserted the words the truth
to replace the word God
in the quote below from monk Thomas Merton’s memoir Seven-Storey Mountain:
The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of the truth. . . . The truth utters me like a word containing a partial thought to himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it.
With that idea in the air like rain mist, I usually enter one of my memoir classes like some kid coming off the beach with a roaring shell to press to everybody’s ear. My big message is: Listen up. I’m a passionate, messy teacher. I give a rat’s ass, and my sole job is to help students fall in love with what I already worship, which means, I show you stuff I’ve read that I can’t live without—Black Boy (aka American Hunger), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Dispatches, The Woman Warrior, Stop-Time, The Kiss, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, The Color of Water, Good-Bye to All That, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Wild, The Duke of Deception, This Boy’s Life, and Speak, Memory—then I’ll lay out any wisdom about the form I’ve either gleaned from them or figured out on my own watch. For the prospective memoirist, I pepper in short lists and lessons.
That’s what you’ll get here—me running back and forth between books I’ve taught and my own dispatches from the muddy trenches, where I wrote three books that basically beat my Texas ass.
There’s a photo of writer Harry Crews on my office door students often ask about because it looks so savagely unliterary. On an English Department hall lined with posters of prim Dickinson in white eyelet lace or that trying-to-be-sinister fop Baudelaire in black velvet, Crews strikes a muscleman pose. Wearing a jean jacket with the sleeves ripped out, he curls up his arm so the bicep’s big as a ham hock. His face is pockmarked, grizzled, with a more-than-once smashed nose. Academia embraces virtually nothing blue collar, and Crews’s image is a small assertion of my humble roots amid the stubbornly white-collar milieu of white tower academia (obvious emphasis on the white, which also predominates). Crews’s meaty fist aims at his own chin as if he’s about to knock himself out with an uppercut. Which I guess he was, as he kept on drinking Rebel whiskey way past when it did him any good. (Once after a binge, he found inside his elbow the still-bloody tattoo he had no recollection of getting—a hinge where his arm bent, as if he were machine, not flesh.)
In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right. Sure, there’s the pleasure of doing work guaranteed to engage you emotionally—who’s indifferent to their own history? The form always has profound psychological consequence on its author. It can’t not. What project can match it for that? Plus you get to hang out with folks no longer on this side of the grass. Places and times you may have for decades ached after wind up erecting themselves around you as you work.
But nobody I know who’s written a great one described it as anything less than a major-league shit-eating contest. Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there’s suffering involved. When I’m trying to edit or coach somebody through one, I usually wind up feeling like the mean sergeant played by Tom Berenger in Platoon. He’s leaning over a screaming soldier whose guts are extruding, and in a husky whisper, Berenger says through gritted teeth, Take the pain,
till the guy shuts up and mechanically starts stuffing his guts back in.
No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self—your neat analyses and tidy excuses. One not-really-a-joke saying in my family is, The trouble started when you hit me back.
Your small pieties and impenetrable, mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up.
In terms of cathartic affect, memoir is like therapy, the difference being that in therapy, you pay them. The therapist is the mommy, and you’re the baby. In memoir, you’re the mommy, and the reader’s the baby. And—hopefully—they pay you. (No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money,
Samuel Johnson said.)
So forget about holes in your memory or lawsuits or how those crazy suckers you share DNA with are going to spaz out once you tell about what Uncle Bubba did during naptime. (I’ll talk later about how you can deal with all those worries.) You can do research,
i.e. postponing writing, till Jesus dons a nightie. But your memoir’s real enemy is blinking back at you from the shaving glass when you floss at night—your ignorant ego and its myriad masks.
Crews’s grossly overlooked A Childhood: The Biography of a Place magically pointed out to me my own lah-dee-dah poses. It’s underrated—virtually unknown—except among the aficionados of the form. I used to worry it wasn’t as good as I thought (particularly when Crews’s fiction never wowed me) until I decided any aversion to it was a form of abject classism, which insists on marginalizing any working-class scribbler.
At the time I came across A Childhood, I was an academically uncredentialed former redneck Texan trying to pass myself off as a poet in hyperliterary Cambridge. Crews had lost time trying to hide his own cracker past, and then he’d written about that milieu in a book that would serve as my lodestar. How good it is, I can no longer gauge. But it helped to guide me out from my biggest psychological hidey-holes. Reading Crews, I found the courage to tell the stories I’d been amassing my whole life. I include so much of him here to underscore how mysterious a single influence can be if he shares a novice’s foibles. Were I a tattoo-getting individual, I’d owe him some fleshly real estate.
I’d owe a lot of other people, too. I’d wind up like the state fair’s illustrated woman, emblazoned with the inked-in faces of the best memoirists. Probably without Crews, I’d have eventually gotten around to my first book. But reading him, which I started doing circa 1980, gave me a shortcut—that sharp awareness of all the false selves I’d concocted for the page that kept me from speaking the truth with the stoppering power of duct tape over my mouth.
At least one purpose of this book is to lay out some lucky gliding spaces for a wannabe memoirist, to help her discover The Story, the one only she can tell; then to help said person craft a voice exactly suited to telling that tale in the truest, most beautiful way. By true, I mean without trying to pawn off fabricated events. By beautiful, I mean for the reader.
What’s the test of beauty? Rereading. A memoir you return to usually feels so intimate—believable, real—that you’re lured back time and again. You miss its geography and atmosphere. Its characters are like old pals you pine after.
However many intellectual pleasures a book may offer up, it’s usually your emotional connection to the memoir’s narrator that hooks you in. And how does she do that? A good writer can conjure a landscape and its peoples to live inside you, and the best writers make you feel they’ve disclosed their soft underbellies. Seeing someone naked thrills us a little.
Maybe I can help prospective writers feel better about disrobing. My lessons and tips for anyone seeking to write a memoir are sprinkled in like pepper—Why Not to Write a Memoir
or Carnality
or How to Choose a Detail.
They’re small and pithy enough that the general reader can pole-vault over those technical blips for students. In a late chapter on Michael Herr, there’s