The Art of Memoir

by Mary Karr

shadowed

Who is my false self?

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.

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.

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.

“know thyself.” A curious mind probing for truth may well set your scribbling ass free.

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

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there’s suffering involved.

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.

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place

lost memories are more our concern, and major lapses happen when episodic memory—events or experiences, feelings, times, places—and autobiographical memory (like episodic, but you-specific) move into semantic memory—thoughts or concepts, facts, meanings, knowledge.

For the more haunted among us, only looking back at the past can permit it finally to become past.

The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage. Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story.

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of [man’s] puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. William Faulkner

voice.

voice grows from the nature of a writer’s talent, which stems from innate character.

The goal of a voice is to speak not with objective authority but with subjective curiosity.

poetic resonance of objects

Siphoning up beauty isn’t only a leitmotif; it’s a form of survival.

Speak, Memory,

The process of his thought has become the point of the book, form marrying into meaning as it does in poetry: a literary miracle.

Anton Chekhov

Maya Angelou

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

James Frey

A Million Little Pieces;

Lillian Hellman’s self-aggrandizing tales in Pentimento, until Mary McCarthy—known as a rigorous truth seeker—told Dick Cavett’s television audience, “Every word out of her mouth is a lie, including and and the.” Nothing protects us against practiced liars and hucksters; nothing ever will.

interiority—that

makes a book rereadable.

The split self or inner conflict must manifest on the first pages and form the book’s thrust or through line—some journey toward the self’s overhaul by book’s end. However random or episodic a book seems, a blazing psychic struggle holds it together, either thematically or in the way a plot would keep a novel rolling forward. Often the inner enemy dovetails with the writer’s own emotional investment in the work at hand. Why is she driven to tell the tale? Usually it’s to go back and recover some lost aspect of the past so it can be integrated into current identity.

emotional stakes—why

flashback structure,

lifetime to get used to occupying your own body,

Most memoirists are driven to their projects for their own deeply felt psychological reasons. As Yeats said, “Mad Ireland hurt me into poetry,” so most of us have been hurt into memoir.

1. Keep a commonplace book: a notebook where you copy beloved poems or hunks of prose out. Nothing will teach you a great writer’s choices better. Plus you can carry your inspiration around with you in compact form. 2. Write reviews or criticism for an online blog or a magazine—it’ll discipline you to find evidence for your opinions and make you a crisper thinker. 3. Augment a daily journal with a reading journal. Compose a one-page review with quotes. Make yourself back up opinions. You can’t just say, “Neruda is a surrealist”; you have to quote him watching laundry “from which slow dirty tears are falling.” And you have to look up something about surrealism to define it. 4. Write out longhand on three-by-five-inch index cards quotes you come across—writer’s name on the left, source and page on the right. (Stanley Kunitz taught me this circa 1978. I now have thousands of these, from which I cobble up lectures.) 5. Memorize poems when you’re stuck. Poets teach you more about economy—not wasting a reader’s time. 6. Write longhand letters to your complicated characters, or even to the dead. You’ll learn more about voice by writing letters—how you arrange yourself different ways for each audience—than in a year of classes.

schism between who I’d wanted to be and who I’d actually been. That’s the stuff of inner conflict and plot.

Most memoirs fail because of voice.

You’re looking for that inner enemy that’ll help you to structure the book.

attendant setbacks and jackpots should lead up to a transformed self at the end. Another

way a crap memoir fails is if the narrator fails to change over time.

pacing problem—it

on day one.

1. Crisp memories—that carnal world in your head 2. Stories and a passion to tell them 3. Some introductory information or data to get across 4. The self-discipline to work in scary blankness for some period of time (for

Paint a physical reality

Tell a story

Package information

probably—the qualifier of a more truthful memoirist.

carnal evidence,