The Art of Memoir

by Mary Karr

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”

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.

As with everything I’ve ever written, I start out paralyzed by fear of failure.

In 1965 I wrote, “When I grow up, I will write ½ poetry and ½ autobiography.”

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.

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.

writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.

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.

(“No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money,” Samuel Johnson said.)

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.

My unscientific, decades-long study proves even the best minds warp and blur what they see.

(Ditto: my favorite parts of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest are more memoir than fiction.)

Truth may have become a foggy, fuzzy nether area. But untruth is simple: making up events with the intention to deceive.

Forget how inventing stuff breaks a contract with the reader, it fences the memoirist off from the deeper truths that only surface in draft five or ten or twenty.

there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: it may continue to tug on you without your being aware of it. And lying about it can—for all but the most hardened

sociopath—carve a lonely gap between your disguise and who you really are.

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

Well, as Frank Conroy said of his mother’s response to Stop-Time, “She felt it was my version of events.” The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage. Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story.

The master memoirist creates such a personal interior space, with memories pieced together, that the reader never loses sight of the enterprise’s tentative nature.

By transcribing the mind so its edges show, a writer constantly reminds the reader that he’s not watching crisp external events played from a digital archive. It’s the speaker’s truth alone. In this way, the form constantly disavows the rigors of objective truth.

you can’t rewrite, give it up. You need to be able to rethink and correct the easy interpretation.

We kind of think the voice is the narrator. It certainly helps if the stories are riveting, but a great voice renders the dullest event remarkable.

Pretty much all the great memoirists I’ve met sound on the page like they do in person.

These writers’ voices make you feel close to—almost inside—their owners. Who doesn’t halfway consider even a fictional narrator like Huck Finn or Scout a pal?

Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You’ll need both sides of yourself—the beautiful and the beastly—to hold a reader’s attention.

without a writer’s dark side on view—the pettiness and vanity and schemes—pages give off the whiff of bullshit.

Richard Wright’s Black Boy, published in pre–civil rights America, seems to shun charm and speak with a bitterness he paid dear for.

It was Wright who started the American memoir craze of the last century with the publication of Black Boy in 1945. (The book gushed out of him in 1943.)

All drama depends on our need to connect with one another. And we’re all doomed to drama; even the most privileged among us suffer the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.

Hearing each other’s stories actually raises our levels of the feel-good hormone oxytocin, which is what nursing mothers secrete when they breastfeed—what partly helps them bond with their young. It helps to join us together in some tribal way.

A story told poorly is life made small by words. The key details are missing, and the sentences might have been spoken by anybody.

Unfortunately, nobody tells a writer how hard cobbling together a voice is.

And you need not be fancy in diction and syntax to win an audience—only true. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes uses the proletariat’s blunt, monosyllabic diction to work magic.

In a great memoir, some aspect of the writer’s struggle for self often serves as the book’s organizing principle, and the narrator’s battle to become whole rages over the book’s trajectory.

Ezra Pound said rhythm in poetry is “cutting a form in time.”

But such is my own faith in poetry, which taps into both the unconscious and memory, that I believe finding the coffin at chapter’s end gives even the most reckless reader the sweet sense of some underlying order.

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. James Wood, How Fiction Works

What rankles me lately, though, is a sweeping tendency to deny even the possibility of truth.

In an off-kilter paradox, our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit on the page.

However often the airwaves wind up clotted with false memories and misidentified criminal culprits and folks dithering about what they recall, I still think a screw has come loose in our culture around notions of truth, a word you almost can’t set down without quotes around it anymore.

The American religion—so far as there is one anymore—seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he’ll never be found wrong.

Some memories—often the best and worst—burn inside us for lifetimes, florid, unforgettable, demanding to be set down.

Carnality may determine whether a memoir’s any good, but interiority—that kingdom the camera never captures—makes a book rereadable. By rereadable, translate: great.

Mainly, the better memoirist organizes a life story around that aforementioned inner enemy—a psychic struggle against herself that works like a thread or plot engine.

As he says near the end, “You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it.”

Once the reader identifies a vain or self-serving streak the writer can’t admit to with candor, a level of distrust interferes with that reader’s experience. In almost every literary memoir I know, it’s the internal struggle providing the engine for the tale.

6. Don’t use jargon to describe people. It’s both disrespectful and bad writing. I never called my parents alcoholics; I showed myself pouring vodka down the sink. Give information in the form you received it.

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain

It’s ironic that the very redneckese I’d spent some time trying to rise above wound up branding my work like hot iron on a steer’s ass. Without borrowing from Daddy’s voice—without the grit and grime of where I’d grown up—I’d been playing with one hand tied back.