The Art of Memoir

by Mary Karr

“Women are repositories of clan lore, and our femininity is gauged by the security of family relationships. To drag out the dirty laundry almost masculinizes a woman.”

In any good memoir, the writer tries to meet the reader where she is by offering information in the way it’s felt—to reflect the writer’s inner values and cares either in clever linguistic form (like McCourt) or dramatic scene (like Orwell).

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.

He had a talent for physical detail and a bemused attention to the human comedy. Until drink ate him up, he was a keen observer, with a knack for zeroing in on a luminous image. At a random stoplight, he’d laugh like hell just seeing a big fat guy on a moped with its tires squashed down. He liked marbled meat and unfiltered Camels; he ate onions raw. He argued from external evidence—a fully imagined place—and the slapstick and violence of his tales drew you in mostly through the vivid portrayals a carnal person has a knack for.

I could argue that concocting that mode of speech actually occupied some thirteen years (seventeen, if you count the requisite years in therapy getting the nerve up). What was I doing during those nine months? Mostly I just shoved words around the page. I’d get up at four or five when my son was asleep, then work. I’d try telling something one way, then another. If a paragraph seemed half decent, I’d cut it out and tape it to the wall. The voice had to be consistent to sound true. Tone could vary, but diction and syntax had to match up.

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.

In memoir the heart is the brain. It’s the Geiger counter you run over memory’s landscape looking for precious metals to light up.

Again: anybody maladroit at apology or changing her mind just isn’t bent for the fluid psychological

state that makes truth discoverable.

who wouldn’t look solemn when called ugly so often? Of course, for the purposes of memoir, it matters not whether he was perceptibly ugly, only that he felt so. No matter

Of course, she only needed that one. The other memory also involves her stepfather. Toward the end of her thousands-mile-long hike, she’s staring into the fire, recalling how her stepfather had taught her to build a fire and pitch a tent. From him, I’d learned how to open a can with a jackknife and paddle a canoe and skip a rock on the surface of a lake. . . . But I was pretty certain as I sat there that night that if it hadn’t been for Eddie, I wouldn’t have found myself on [the trail]. . . . He hadn’t loved me well in the end, but he had loved me well when it mattered. So

despite her heartbreak at his leaving, and “though it was true everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat,” her load was lightened by all he’d taught her that she could use. She wound up feeling he and her mother had given her all the tools she needed to make it.

Maybe Laura feels this way

I don’t know if memoirists are lied to more often as kids or only grow up to resent it more, but it does seem we often come from the ranks of orphans or half-orphans-through-divorce, trying to heal schisms inside ourselves. Like everybody, I suppose, people we loved broke our hearts because only they had access to them, and we broke our own hearts later by following their footsteps and reenacting their mistakes.

Also, I’d chosen Cherry as an ironic title: I felt—due to household upheaval and two childhood rapes—I’d lost my innocence long before I should have. But the more I wrote, the more I discovered that innocence had never left me, if you measure innocence as a capacity for belief—particularly a belief in love. What was mine in terms of hope and sweet longing had been with me all along—still, in some ways, is.

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. 21 | Why Memoirs Fail My last memory is the Headmaster’s parting shot: “Well, good-bye, Graves, and remember that your best friend is the waste-paper

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

The landscape he reports on never stops shape-shifting. So blurry and hallucinatory is his crazy-quilt collage, you’d no more look to him for facts than a court would privilege an eyewitness on ’shrooms at the time.

Herr never makes himself a figure of pity, but I disagree with a reviewer who claimed the book is not about him. It’s not in the sense that he’s never doing what Leo Tolstoy blames Ivan Turgenev for—“pointing to the tear in his eye.” As with many great memoirists, you are never not behind his eyes.

Author of Full Metal Jacket

we’re not just responsible for all we do, but for all we see, too. This frees us from blaming or judging anybody. (In this, it echoes my Catholic notion of original sin—we’re all the same!) “Great bodhisattvas get sick and die from taking on the suffering of others. They pray to be reborn in hell.” (Hell being the first place Jesus went after the cross.) Reading Michael Herr puts you in touch not just with the brutality we humans are capable of, but with some nobility that persists and persists and is made glorious by refusing defeat in horror’s presence. It’s not sweet and noble to die for one’s country, but anyone who insists on leaning into the light in the face of so much darkness enacts perhaps the hardest-won of fortitudes.

The map embodies the book’s central worry—how “hard data” or “official information”—the stuff most reporters are shopping for—avoids the real impenetrable mystery of human suffering and nobility always evident in war’s carnage.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain

Revision is the secret to their troubles—and yours. That, and a sense of quality that exceeds what you can do—that gives you something to strive for. Actually, every writer needs two selves—the generative self and the editor self.

I find generative me harder to get going. But through sheer hardheadedness, even I can grant myself permission to run buck-wild down the page with sentences dumb as stumps and few glimpses of anything pretty.

When it works, it’s like a spell has been cast. For me, it’s less the old world that comes in clear as the old me—how

how I felt, what I schemed about, who I lied to. But the writing’s seldom pretty—the sentences are just banal. The pushing comes when editor me comes back to comb over—and over and over—the pages, unpacking each moment. Mostly I take general ideas and try to show them carnally or in a dramatic story.

kinesthetic

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.

In the long run, the revision process feels better if you approach it with curiosity.

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.

Rewriting on the page is safer than revision in, say, painting, where you can paint past a good place and wreck a canvas. Performers can’t revise at all. A writer can always go back to an earlier draft. The point is to have more curiosity about possible forms the work could take than sense of self-protection for your ego.

If we are truly alive, then we must be aware of this.

have never done anything “useful.” No discovery of mine has made or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. . . . Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil, and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. . . . I have added something to knowledge and helped others to add more; and these somethings have a value that differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them. I often hand this out to students as they graduate, to remind them that anybody struggling to make something—no matter how they succeed or don’t in terms of the marketplace—has entered into conversation with giants. We’re all in the same arena, and our efforts differ “in degree only, and not in kind.”

None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.