The Art of Memoir

by Mary Karr

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.

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.

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.

And while formerly sacred sources of truth like history and statistics have lost ground, the subjective tale has garnered new territory. That’s partly why memoir is in its ascendancy—not because it’s not corrupt, but because the best ones openly confess the nature of their corruption.

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

A believable voice notes how the self may or may not be inventing reality, morphing one’s separate “truths.” Most of us don’t read the landscape so much as we beam it from our eyeballs.

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.

The need to rout out my own inner demons is why I always start off fumbling through my own recollections. Only later, after several drafts do I engage in “research” by visiting old haunts and passing my manuscript around. The memories I’ve gnawed on and rehearsed are the ones most key to what’s eating me up, and only those can help me to find a book’s shape.

I often interview myself about how I came to an opinion. Then, rather than present an abstract judgment (“She was a thief”), I try to re-create how I came to that opinion.

There’s a difference between mystery and obscurity, poet Donald Justice once said. About real mystery—Hilary Mantel’s run-ins with ghosts, say—a writer can say every dang thing she knows without lessening the enigma’s power; obscurity is just hiding out of cowardice what fundamentally needs unveiling.

But isn’t this using my strength? Poets are good at describing stuff, right? Shouldn’t I do that as much as possible? Yes, but unless the description helps the story along or reveals something psychological, it’s froufrou, embroidery, decor.

In terms of basic book shape, I’ve used the same approach in all three of mine: I start with a flash forward that shows what’s at stake emotionally for me over the course of a book, then tell the story in straightforward, linear time. I wouldn’t suggest that shape for everybody, but I would say you have to start out setting emotional stakes—why the enterprise is a passionate one for you, what’s at risk—early

If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.

To manufacture stuff in hopes of selling more books means you never do honor to your own trials and conquests, what Faulkner might call your postage stamp of reality.

Some students in our three-year MFA program come in defending every word; by mid-term second year, the more determined ones find themselves in despair at their own pages. Through reading and thinking, they’ve raised their taste beyond their skill levels. So when they stare down at their pages, they can no longer superimpose what’s in their heads onto the work.