Mary Karr - The Art of Memoir

To Sarah Harwell & Brooks Haxton

for decades of showing me how

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself with glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed, I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me I am my own mistake.

Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation

So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into.

Lorrie Moore

Contents

No one elected me the boss of memoir. I speak for no one but myself. Every writer worth her salt is sui generis. Memoirists methodswith regard to handling actual events, memory, research, dealing with family and other subjects, legal whatnot, voice, etc.differ from mine as widely as their lives do. Where Ive learned from others, I add it. But this is no compendium of popular approaches to the form.

Also, theres a place in hell for writers who quote themselves and a few times, I am forced to recap adventures reported elsewhere. If I didnt have to pay out the wazoo to quote from better books than my own, Id have way more Nabokov in here. An appendix at the back cites great memoirs. A concerted study of those will no doubt pay off for you as it did for me. Maybe the methods I use to parse books will help you fall in love with those masterpieces.

Special thanks to masters of various nonfiction forms I interviewed for this book: Philip Gourevitch, Kathryn Harrison, Michael Herr, Jon Krakauer, Larissa MacFarquhar, Jerry Stahl, Gary Shteyngart, Cheryl Strayed, Geoffrey Wolff. Over the decades, conversations with others have schooled me: Martin Amis, Maya Angelou, Fr. Edward Beck, Bill Buford, Robert Caro, Frank Conroy, Rodney Crowell, Mark Doty, Dave Eggers, Lucy Grealy, Maxine Hong Kingston, Phil Jackson, Fr. James Martin, SJ, Peter Matthiessen, James McBride, Frank McCourt, Carolyn See, Lisa See, John Edgar Wideman, Tobias Wolff, Koren Zailckas. Dmitri Nabokov informed my thinking about his fathers memoir.

Finally, much of what I say may well apply to writing novels or poems or love letters or bank applications or parole board pleasin short, any kind of scribbling. But since its memoir theyve paid me for, Ill stick to it.

Dont follow me, Im 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 outsiders artthe province of weirdos and saints, prime ministers and film stars. As a grad student thirty years back, I heard it likened to inscribing the Lords Prayer on a grain of rice. So I still feel some lingering obligation to defend it.

Partly what murders me about memoirwhat I adoreis its democratic (some say ghetto-ass primitive), anybody-whos-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 memoirs audience. As fiction grew more fabulist or dystopic or hyperintellectual under the sway of Joyce and Woolf and Garca Mrquez 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. (Gourevitchs classic on the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, is also a masterpiece.) Heres 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 literatureto 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, wouldnt 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 roomnow dubbed The War Roomresembled 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 centuryno, its 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 Id written. And I resisted the urge to slink off to hide under the bed like a dog with a bad haircut.

As with everything Ive ever written, I start out paralyzed by fear of failure. The tarantula egostarving to be shored up by praisetries to scare me away from saying simply whatever small, true thing is standing in line for me to say.