The Art of Memoir

by Mary Karr

last year trying to cobble up what a physicist would call a Unified Field Theory or Theory of Everything about the form. I imagined a better me would have done this already. (A better me, says the nattering voice in my head, wouldn’t eat Oreos by the sleeve.)

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

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.

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.

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.

A curious mind probing for truth may well set your scribbling ass free.

A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it.

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.

Reading Crews, I found the courage to tell the stories I’d been amassing my whole life.

credence to any after-the-fact confession, especially one as vague or self-justifying as this one. It’s as if after lunch the deli guy quipped, “I put just a teaspoon of catshit in your sandwich, but you didn’t notice it at all.” To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it.

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

Whether age has granted me more wholesome care for the girl I was, or whether life’s ravages have ground down my heart so I’m more self-centered, I can’t say.

Vis-à-vis interpretation: be generous and fair when you can; when you can’t, admit your disaffinity. My general idea is to keep the focus on myself and my own struggles, not speculate on other people’s motives, and not concoct events and characters out of whole cloth.

Just apply your ass to the chair (as someone wise once said, a writer’s only requirement) and for fifteen or twenty minutes, practice getting your attention out of your head, down to some wider expanse in your chest or solar plexus—a place less self-conscious or skittery or scared. The idea is to unclench your mind’s claws. So don’t judge how your thoughts might jet around at first.

Eventually you’ll start identifying a little bit with that detached, watcher self and less with your prattling head.

You’re seeking enough quiet to let the Real You...

Start by composing the scene in carnal terms—by which I mean using sensory impressions, not sexual ones. Smell is the oldest sense—even one-celled animals without spinal cords can smell—and it cues emotional memory like nothing else.

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.

We can accept anything from a memoirist but deceit, which is—almost always—a shallow person’s lack of self-knowledge.

For speaking from passionately felt events is risky. Emotional stakes make drama, which is a conflict with feeling and danger mysteriously contained in a human body’s small space. Don’t get me wrong—a writer’s voice doesn’t have to be effusive or operatic to work.

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. People we adore drop dead or die over tortured years. We’re born ugly and poor, or rich and handsome but uncared-for. In even the best families, loved ones—however inadvertently—manage to destroy each other’s hope.

Robert Frost said anytime he heard wordless voices through a wall, tone told him who was angry, who bemused, who about to cry. For me psyche equals voice, so your own psyche—how you think and see and wonder and scudge and suffer—also determines such factors as pacing and what you write about when.

So powerful is Conroy’s voice that—at the zenith of his powers—he’s able to sexualize the throwing of a yoyo: That it was vaguely masturbatory seems inescapable. I doubt that half the pubescent boys in America could have been captured by any other means. . . . A single Loop-the-Loop might represent, in some mysterious way, the act of masturbation, but to break down the entire repertoire into the three stages of throw, trick, and return representing erection, climax, and detumescence seems immoderate.

Having taught Conroy’s Stop-Time for some thirty years, I can testify that students seem to trust this voice. They believe it—that it won’t lie or mislead, fabricate events or pander, confess the lesser sin to hide the greater, bore or beg for pity. Ergo, in literary terms, it sounds true.

Again: voice grows from the nature of a writer’s talent, which stems from innate character.

We don’t see events objectively; we perceive them through ourselves. And we remember through a filter of both who we are now and who we once were.

this is so so true for me.

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

The life chroniclers who endure as real artists come across as folks particularly schooled in their own rich inner geographies. A quest for self-knowledge drives such a writer to push past the normal vanity she brings to party dressing.

Looked at through the lens of a more ordinary writer’s gifts, Speak, Memory leaves out much that a normal reader tends to identify with. Yet we wander its pages with wonder and feel bereft as any exile at its end.

need to read this...

You’re intimate with the writer’s thought processes without feeling he has anything in common with the likes of you. The writing is intoxicating and irresistible—but you can’t find your experience anywhere in it. His extreme refinement frees him from the humdrum where most of us live. Novelist Jenny Offill refers to him as “an art monster”: “Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. [His wife] licked his stamps for him.”

well, maybe not ~ LOL

He’s just your standard virtuoso aristocrat from a gilded age.

well, maybe on this tenant I coukd read it...Ivalways wanted to be an aristocrat

Nabokov, which teaches them a lot—mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don’t sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer’s best voice will grow from embracing her own “you-ness”—which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice.

the genius of Karr insight

“Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison.”

Nabokov can draw tears from me at certain passages as predictably as if turned on by a spigot. Students who fear sentimentality as death have to study Nabokov, who proves that sentimentality is only emotion you haven’t proven to the reader—emotion without vivid evidence. For Nabokov, memory itself is a country, and his tender reflections, coupled with longing, move us even more perhaps in coming from a speaker who can be so cool. I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses on the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth, pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness: a bumblebee has entered

The process of his thought has become the point of the book, form marrying into meaning as it does in poetry: a literary miracle.

Again, in instants of hyperarousal, focus narrows; sense memories from these states may sometimes stay brighter in recollection than others.

Don’t mistake my view of Graves: he’s an extremely carnal writer, and his scenes of trench warfare clench at a reader’s bowels. But here the sentences have the quality more of a semantic memory than an episodic one—memory told more than memory lived. There is not a single scene but several condensed into phrases. He tells you he’s sick but doesn’t occupy the sick body. The only sense memory—large but not dwelled on above—is that of shells bursting in bed. Because they are plural, the faces are less vivid to us.

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. Sometimes it strikes me that even when we know something’s true, it’s almost rude to say so, as if claiming a truth at all—what? threatens someone else’s experience? Most of all, no one wants to sound like some self-satisfied proselytizer everybody can pounce on and debunk.

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.

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.

Mantel in Giving Up the Ghost wrestling with her ability to incorporate her experience of the supernatural in a time when she’d be adjudged mad for the belief:

So now I come to write a memoir. I tell myself, just say how you came to sell a house with a ghost in it. But this story can only be told once, and I need to get it right. Why does the act of writing generate so much anxiety? Margaret Atwood says, “The written word is so much like evidence—like something that can be used against you.” I used to think that autobiography was a form of weakness, and perhaps I still do. But I also think that, if you’re weak, it’s childish to pretend to be strong.

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.

Reading George Orwell’s masterful essay “Shooting an Elephant”—for

“You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it.”

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses respect for himself. And having no respect, he ceases to love.

In short: How are you trying to appear? The author of a lasting memoir manages to power past the initial defenses, digging past the false self to where the truer one waits to tell the more complicated story.

Families exist to witness each other’s disappointments. Laura Sillerman