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.

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.

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.

Memory is a pinball in a machine—it messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of scenes, stories you’ve heard. Then the machine goes tilt and snaps off.

a single image can split open the hard seed of the past, and soon memory pours forth from every direction, sprouting its vines and flowers up around you till the old garden’s taken shape in all its fragrant glory. Almost unbelievable how much can rush forward to fill an absolute blankness.

You know the difference between a vague memory and a clear one, and the vague ones either get left out or labeled dubious. It’s the clear ones that matter most anyway, because they’re the ones you’ve nursed and worried over and talked through and wondered about your whole life. And you’re seeking the truth of memory—your memory and character—not of unbiased history.

The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage. Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story. We also have to distinguish between memories wrangled over at the supper table and memoirs combed over and revised dozens of times before being published.

For veracity’s sake, it doesn’t cost a memoirist the reader’s confidence either to skip over the half-remembered scene or to replicate her own psychic uncertainty—“This part is blurry.” Any decent comp teacher schools you to work in the realms of maybe and perhaps. The great memoirist enacts recall’s fuzzy form. That’s why we trust her.

Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments. In my last memoir, I couldn’t report a malicious quip from my ex-husband without mentioning that he never spoke to me that way. Maybe that’s why it stayed carved in my psyche: it was out of character. A writer whose point of view was closer inside the past might only concentrate on feeling wounded by the insult without tacking on that fact, because it could jar the reader from the instant.

If the events you’re writing about are less than seven or eight years past, you might find it harder than you think. Distance frees us of our former ego’s vanities and lets us see deeper into events.

You need to be able to rethink and correct the easy interpretation.

What would you write if you weren’t afraid?