Truth-telling
In her three memoirs (“The Liar’s Club,” “Cherry,” “Lit”), Mary Karr made the stuff of a rough life shimmer and burn. Alcoholism (her tall-tale-telling daddy’s, her wild-woman mother’s and her own), sexual coming of age, violence, drugs, longing and divorce all got the magnifying-glass-in-the-sun treatment. That searing honesty coupled with a kick-ass sense of humor won her an ardent following; “The Liar’s Club” spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list.
Given the explosion of interest in true stories and the fact that Karr has taught writing for more than 30 years, it’s not surprising that her publisher coaxed her to produce a manual of sorts. Nor is it surprising that she uses it to make the case for what might be her deepest values, not only in writing but also in life.
In a preface titled “Welcome to My Chew Toy” (for all the years she “pawed and gnawed” at it), she notes that until rather recently, memoir was “an outsider’s art — the province of weirdos and saints, prime ministers and film stars.” Now, however, we live in a culture that craves personal narratives, even by non-boldface names, and we desire mightily to plumb our own troublesome depths. Anyone hoping to make some sense of a confounding past — and whose isn’t? — might very well be sharpening a chewable pencil or three.
For writers hoping to turn their experiences into a book, Karr offers a fistful of useful if familiar tips: summon sensory details, scribble letters to your characters, meditate, keep a reading journal. More arresting and ultimately more helpful are the chapters where she grapples with the nature of memory and the approachability of truth.
Anyone who has ever had a that’s-not-the-way-it-happened conversation with a sibling knows that trying to recapture the simplest event can be exasperating. “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,” Karr writes. Even if you were to be blessed (or cursed) with perfect recall, the act of composition would force you to highlight some events and elide others.
That said, Karr argues for fighting as hard as humanly possible for veracity — both the surface truth and the deeper truth beneath it. None of this comes readily to her. A recurrent theme of the book is the importance of multiple revisions, by which she seems to mean re-vision. It’s one (necessary) thing to keep writing toward a more felicitous or engaging sentence, another to accept the intellectual and spiritual challenge to re-see the things we want to let our eyes slide past.
While celebrating a wide array of writerly approaches (with detailed analysis of passages from Michael Herr, Hilary Mantel, Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff, Maxine Hong Kingston, Vladimir Nabokov and Mary McCarthy), she can’t help but hold in contempt those memoirists who deliberately fabricate. Beyond the obvious breach of contract with the reader, Karr regards it as a fundamental betrayal of self: “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.”
What really angers her is the idea that truth is so malleable that it no longer matters. “Disgraced con men have helped to author the dominant notion that a thinking person can’t possibly discern between a probable truth and a hyper-embellished swindle. Based on their antics, we’ve begun to abandon all judgment, thinking instead, Oh, who knows, anything’s possible, everybody lies anyway.”
Truth-telling has its own perils, of course. Nobody’s memoir exists in a bubble, and many a writer loses sleep worrying about spouses, family members and friends who might be miffed — or worse — by unflattering or disputed portrayals.
Karr reveals that before publication, she shows her manuscripts to everyone she has written about. Her sobered-up mother gave “The Liar’s Club” her blessing: “‘If I gave a s— what people thought, I’d have been baking cookies and going to the PTA.’ ”
Remarkably, Karr maintains that none of her family, friends, shrinks or acquaintances has ever objected to a manuscript. That might be divine compensation for a spectacularly crappy childhood, but more likely has something to do with her rules for dealing with people. She sits down in person with her “characters” and, if they want, allows them to pick a pseudonym. More tellingly — and the reason “The Art of Memoir” could have been called “The Art of Living” — she eschews labeling others or pretending to know their motives, and asks herself whether she has viewed anyone too harshly. Perhaps the most important insight Karr imparts is this: “It’s mostly love that drives me to the page.”