The Art of Memoir

by Mary Karr

Don’t follow me, I’m lost, the master said to the follower who had a cocked pen and a yellow pad. Stephen Dunn, “Visiting the Master”

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.

Black Boy (aka American Hunger), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Dispatches, The Woman Warrior, Stop-Time, The Kiss, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, The Color of Water, Good-Bye to All That, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Wild, The Duke of Deception, This Boy’s Life, and Speak, Memory

You can do “research,” i.e. postponing writing, till Jesus dons a nightie. But your memoir’s real enemy is blinking back at you from the shaving glass when you floss at night—your ignorant ego and its myriad masks.

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. Louise Glück, “Nostos”

The whole journey is toward the truth, or toward authenticity, agency, and freedom. How could it possibly help to plant a lie in the middle of it? Edward St Aubyn

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.

A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or to pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is. He’s missing the personal liberation that comes from the examined life.

It’s the disparities in your childhood, your life between ass-whippings, that throws past pain into stark relief for a reader. Without those places of hope, the beatings become too repetitive—maybe they’d make a dramatic read for a while, but single-note tales seldom bear rereading.

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.

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. Am I healthily less codependent or a bigger bitch? You could argue either way.

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it. Zora Neale Hurston

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.

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.

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.

The voice should permit a range of emotional tones—too wiseass, and it denies pathos; too pathetic, and it’s shrill.

Also, we naturally tend to superimpose our present selves onto who we were before, and that can prevent us from recalling stuff that doesn’t shore up our current identities. Or it can warp understanding to fit more comfortable interpretations. All those places we misshape the past have to be ’fessed to, and such reflections and uncertainties have to find expression in voice.

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

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.

The least articulate of confessors can—in fleeting moments of connection—move me as a great symphony does. And it’s from the need to capture the shared connections between us that symphonies were invented. Ditto memoirs.

In even the best families, loved ones—however inadvertently—manage to destroy each other’s hope. They fail to show up at the key instant, or they show up serving grief and shame when tenderness is starved for.

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

Developing a voice is actually learning how to lodge your own memories inside someone else’s head. In some ways the narrator comes to exist as a stand-in for the reader.

So enchanting is the atmosphere Nabokov conjures in my brain that reading him almost rewires it. I lift my face from a folded-down page to find colors brighter, edges sharper. Trash I glimpse on my otherwise shoddy street—a ticket stub or lipsticky cigarette butt—come across as souvenirs from some intrigue that dissolved right before I looked up. The world becomes a magic collage or mysterious art box à la found-object assembler Joseph Cornell.

sophisticated about carnal writing means selecting sensual data—items, odors, sounds—to recount details based on their psychological effects on a reader. A great detail feels particular in a way that argues for its truth. A reader can take it in.

Carnality may determine whether a memoir’s any good, but interiority—that kingdom the camera never captures—makes a book rereadable. By rereadable, translate: great. Your connection to most authors usually rests (Nabokov and a few others aside) in how you may identify with them. Mainly, the better memoirist organizes a life story around that aforementioned inner enemy—a psychic struggle against herself that works like a thread or plot engine.

Whenever a writer gets reflective about how she feels or complains or celebrates or plots or judges, she moves inside herself to where things matter and mean.

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.

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. Fyodor Dostoevsky

Amy Tan put it this way: “Sure, you can establish tidy moral or political standards for how race is represented on the page: it’s called propaganda.” Propaganda seeks to destroy art in order to sanitize culture. Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior has outlived the past’s more sexist environment to win the ardor of generations. It’s a timeless monument to memoir’s possibilities.

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

“If you’re writing about somebody you hate, do it with great love.”

If somebody’s opinion of what happened wholly opposes mine, I mention it in passing without feeling obliged to represent it.

Don’t use jargon to describe people. It’s both disrespectful and bad writing. I never called my parents alcoholics; I showed myself pouring vodka down the sink. Give information in the form you received it.

Let your friends choose their...

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain

Young writers often ask me to help them order information in a story. But there’s a proven method you can try. Imagine sitting down to tell it to a pal at lunch. You’d have no problem figuring out what goes where.

Start trying to bring yourself to the page, and fear of how you’ll come off besets even the most forthright. The best you can hope for is to rip off each mask as you find it blotting out your vision.

Maybe it takes a lifetime to get used to occupying your own body, writer or no. Self-deceit is the bacterium affecting every psyche to varying degrees, especially in youth. We like to view ourselves a certain way.

Write longhand letters to your complicated characters, or even to the dead. You’ll learn more about voice by writing letters—how you arrange yourself different ways for each audience—than in a year of classes.

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.

You’re looking for that inner enemy that’ll help you to structure the book. I always have inklings of it, but tend to find it by writing interior frets and confessions and yearnings as I recall them. Maybe it’s only manifest after a first draft. Once I’ve found it, I’ll revise with it as the spine—how the self evolves to reconcile its inner conflicts over time. Your attendant setbacks and jackpots should lead up to a transformed self at the end.

Unless there’s a political motive (as for Robert Graves or Richard Wright), a bitter book grows tired, a vengeful one unreadable. You know the writer’s morphing every event to make a point.

Think, figure, wonder, guess. Show yourself weighing what’s true, your fantasies, values, schemes, and failures.

Change times back and forth—early on, establish the “looking back” voice, and the “being in it” voice.

Show not so much how you suffer in long passages, but how you survive. Use humor or an interjecting adult voice to help a reader over the dark places.

Watch your blind spots—in revision, if not before, search for reversals. Beware of what you avoid and what you cling to.

Love your characters. Ask yourself what underlay their acts and versions of the past. Sometimes I pray to see people I’m angry at or resentful of as God sees them, which heals both page and heart.

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

I’ve heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful—it’s “fun” only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality.