The Art of Memoir

by Mary Karr

Lying is done with words, but also with silence. Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”

It takes an obsessive streak that borders on lunacy to go rummaging around in the past as memoirists are wont to do, particularly a fragmented or incendiary past, in which facts are sparse and stories don’t match up.

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.

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.

I already do this.

Augment a daily journal with a reading journal. Compose a one-page review with quotes. Make yourself back up opinions.

I already do this!

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.)

Memorize poems when you’re stuck. Poets teach you more about economy—not wasting a reader’s time.

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.

Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off. If you find yourself blocked for a period, maybe goad yourself in the direction of how you hoped at the time. Ask yourself if you aren’t strapping your current self across the past to hide the real story.

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

Shallow reportage usually stems from a lack of psychological self-knowledge.

The great Holocaust memoirs portray not just great suffering but great hope and wisdom and forms of psychological endurance and curiosity. They seem written to help us understand something complex, not to prove a single point in dreary repetition.

Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me.

Writers hate formulas and checklists. It’s way more fun to masquerade as a natural shaman who channels beautiful pages as the oracle once channeled Zeus. But looking at my own books, I’ve found they all include most of the stuff below—as do most of the books I teach.

As a writer you can’t just start jamming stuff together, hoping the reader will magically know what’s in your mind. You have to start out slowly, by laying transitions—like leaving breadcrumbs for the reader. Then the transitions get quicker through the book. As you get used to the method, the breadcrumbs grow fewer and eventually vanish. By the end, it’s all sped-up jump cuts

with invisible connections the reader’s already mastered.

In fact, after a lifetime of hounding authors for advice, I’ve heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful—it’s “fun” only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality.

Reading through history cultivates in a writer a standard of quality higher than the marketplace. You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history. History’s harder, but also more stable—and the books are better because they’ve been culled over time. Yes, the canon remains deeply flawed and has only begun to open up, but it’s invariably true that work that’s lasted for centuries has been sifted through over that time.

For me, the last 20 percent of a book’s improvement takes 95 percent of the effort—all in the editing. I can honestly say not one page I’ve ever published appears anywhere close to how it came out in first draft. A poem might take sixty versions. I am not much of a writer, but I am a stubborn little bulldog of a reviser.

Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world. And you do that by fighting for elegance and beauty, redoing or cutting the flabby, disordered parts.

Just picking up a pen makes you part of a tradition of writers that dates thousands of years back and includes Homer and Toni Morrison and cave artists sketching buffalo.

Appendix | Required Reading—Mostly Memoirs and Some Hybrids

*Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

*Saint Augustine. Confessions.

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son.

*Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks.

Chast, Roz. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

*Crick, Francis, and James Watson. The Double Helix.

*Dinesen, Isak. Out of Africa. *Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. *Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk.

Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

*Haley, Alex, and Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

King, Stephen. On Writing.

*Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air. Lawrence, T. E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Least Heat-Moon, William. Blue Highways: A Journey into America.

*Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy.

Machado, Carmen Maria. In the Dream House.

*McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes.

Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia,

Down and Out in Paris and London.

Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Smith, Patti. Just Kids.

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle.

Westover, Tara. Educated.

*Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

*Wolff, Tobias. This Boy’s Life