AN EXPERT’S GUIDE TO PRESENTING THE PAST
Mary Karr gives a masterclass in autobiography, and is at her best when writing about herself
There’s a textbook lurking at the heart of Mary Karr’s new book about how memoirs have and should be written. But it’s a chaotic one: Karr is, by her own admission, “a passionate, messy teacher”. The passionate part is what drew so many readers to The Liars’ Club (1995), a rip-roaring, child’s-eye psychodrama about her family’s life in East Texas, which she now calls “the Ringworm Belt”. The messy part leads her to create chapter headings like “Interiority and Inner Enemy — Private Agonies Read Deeper Than External Whammies”.
Karr acknowledges that this book began with the teaching syllabus she uses at Syracuse University, where merely becoming one of her students is a major achievement. (Some, like Cheryl Strayed and Koren Zailckas, have gone on to write best-selling memoirs of their own.) She has fleshed it out with analyses of some of her favourite memoirists’ work, but she can’t help being more interesting than her lesson plans. The best parts of this book are those that veer off course and find her writing about herself again.
When she teaches Nabokov, Karr freely admits that he has little in common with the other writers she looks at most closely here: Maya Angelou, Harry Crews, Michael Herr, Frank Conroy, Frank McCourt, Geoffrey Wolff, Tobias Wolff and Kathryn Harrison.
“He’s just your standard virtuoso aristocrat from a gilded age,” she says of Nabokov, after citing passages from Speak, Memory that violate her basic teaching principles.
She honours his example even though the “deep link” between writer and reader, a sine qua non for Karr, isn’t something that Nabokov deigns to supply.
But, she says, “students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot — mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself.” Though she doesn’t say so, she must run into even more students who try to imitate Mary Karr.
Twenty years ago, when Karr, a poet and novelist, burst onto the scene with a memoir of a redneck (her word) childhood that managed to be rollicking, tragic, hilarious, specific and authentic, she paved the way for a generation’s worth of books about dangerously dysfunctional families and keen-eyed kids trying to survive them. She has since written two other memoirs, Cherry and Lit.
What we learn here, in the parts of The Art of Memoir that aren’t straight out of her classroom curriculum, is that she had to make a long journey to rediscover and retrieve the wisecracking voice that would seem to come so naturally to her. She needed to shake off the pretensions that sent her to France, put her in a beret, had her dropping the name of the Sorbonne (although they had her pronouncing it “the Sore Bone”) and writing fiction that prettified her past.
In an early novel, she turned her alcoholic mother into a ballerina and herself into a model child. “She never bites anybody!” the presentday Karr observes with wonder. She also had the mother giving the girl a pair of 19th-century opera glasses, whereas in life, Karr’s father had given her his old army binoculars. “Holy wish fulfilment, Sigmund,” Karr writes of her urge to embellish the truth this way.
First and foremost, she sees memoir writing as a way to cut a path back to the writer’s past and rediscover it. “A fierce urge to try re-experiencing your own mind and body and throbbing heart alive inside the most vivid stories from your past is Step 1,” she says.
But how? That’s what many of Karr’s readers will have picked up The Art of Memoir to find out. Although she’s a writer some of us would follow anywhere, she acknowledges that much of this book is for would-be practitioners, that it can be technical and that at its most “lapidary”, its close analyses may bore the general reader. That’s an accurate assessment. She also offers many bones of contention concerning the most basic advice this book doles out.
As someone who legitimately feared being physically attacked by her own mother, Karr can advise starting with a flashback, calling this a safe and dramatic way for a memoir to begin. Yes, but it’s also the most hackneyed way for people whose lives are less volcanic. She tells writers to be aware of their sensory impressions. (Oddly, she substitutes “carnal” for “sensory” throughout the book.) There’s nothing wrong with that idea, but it’s hardly new. She rails against “big fat liars” like James Frey ( A Million Little Pieces, which he claimed was only 5% dishonest, according to a page count) and Greg Mortenson ( Three Cups of Tea). But she also tells students that they can fudge details, as long as the detail helps give an important memory an air of authenticity.
She is much more helpful about practical obstacles in the memoirist’s path, like family members who may not be happy with the way the author wants to describe them. Karr again makes herself Exhibit A by describing the problems she had with her sister over The Liars’ Club, and how threatening to take her sister out of the book managed to quell them.
But she advises writers to be honest with people who are in their books, letting them choose their own pseudonyms (and presumably co-opting them a bit) and preparing them for some painful moments. It was tough for her to have her mother read about herself in The Liars’ Club and tell Karr, “I didn’t know you felt this way.”
The Art of Memoir also warns the prospective memoirist about the single person with whom you will have the most trouble: yourself. Writing a book like this requires figuring out who you are and how you want your voice to sound. No matter how long this takes, it has to be done.
“The only way I know how to develop a voice is to write your voice into one,” advises Karr, who says she threw away 1,200 finished pages of Lit, her last memoir, and broke the delete key on her keyboard changing her mind.
Another memoirist’s skill that she demonstrates but doesn’t mention here: Sound uncertain, even if you’re as good as Mary Karr. Readers will love you for your imperfections. Works every time.