The Art of Memoir

by Mary Karr

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.

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.

Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It’s not just raw reportage flung splat on the page. Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you’re shaping the past’s meaning. Plus, memoir uses novelistic devices like cobbling together dialogue you failed to record at the time. To concoct a distinctive voice, you often have to do a poet’s lapidary work. And the good ones reward study. You’re making an experience for a reader, a show that conjures your past—inside and out—with enough lucidity that a reader gets way more than just the brief flash of titillation. You owe a long journey, and most of all, you owe all the truth you can wheedle out of yourself. So while it is a shaped experience, the best ones come from the soul of a human unit oddly compelled to root out the past’s truth for his own deeply felt reasons.

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.

The great memoirist enacts recall’s fuzzy form. That’s why we trust her.

The memoirist’s job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in. Otherwise, the reader will gawk at you like somebody on Springer, or she’ll pity you—in both cases, you lose some authority. The book becomes too much about your feeling and not enough about the reader’s. Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself, What haven’t I said? How might someone else involved have seen it differently? And most of all, how am I afraid of appearing? Go beyond looking bad or good. Is there posturing or self-consciousness you could cut or correct or confess and make use of?

The secret to any voice grows from a writer’s finding a tractor beam of inner truth about psychological conflicts to shine the way. While an artist consciously constructs a voice, she chooses its elements because they’re natural expressions of character. So above all, a voice has to sound like the person wielding it—the super-most interesting version of that person ever—and grow from her core self.

However you charm people in the world, you should do so on the page.

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.

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

As you start out in rough drafts, setting down stories as clearly as you can, there begins to burble up onto the page what’s exclusively yours both as a writer and a human being. If you trust the truth enough to keep unveiling yourself on the page—no matter how shameful those revelations may at first seem—the book will naturally structure itself to maximize what you’re best at. You’re best at it because it sits at the core of your passions.

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.

One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit.

If you trust that what you felt deeply warrants your emotional response, try to honor your past by writing it that way.

Writing as directly as possible out of that single “true” core and nascent ability will naturally unify pages. Otherwise, there will be inconsistencies that read as fake. False choices based on who you wish you were will result in places where the voice goes awry or the details chosen ring false.

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.

The fractured poetry of American idiom naturally enthralled him, and he cultivated an ear for the small majesty of the average human unit speaking.

I am not much of a writer, but I am a stubborn little bulldog of a reviser.

In the long run, the revision process feels better if you approach it with curiosity. Each editorial mark can’t register as a “mistake” that threatens the spider ego. Remind yourself that revising proves your care for the reader and the nature of your ambition. 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.

The point is to have more curiosity about possible forms the work could take than sense of self-protection for your ego.

But I still feel awe for us—yes, for the masters who wrought lasting beauty from their hard lives, but for the rest of us, too, for the great courage all of us show in trying to wring some truth from the godawful mess of a single life. To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind.