The Art of Memoir

As you might know from reading this blog I’ve been on a memoir kick, because I am trying to write one, a fact which I hope you’ll forget if I fail miserably. And if you’re a long time reader you know that I was trying to publish a novel with an agent and after a year of trying, no bites. So failing is a definite possibility. But most good writers had the same problem and the same fear each time they started a new work, so I am in good company.

When I recently picked up Mary Karr’s new book on the subject, The Art of Memoir, it was like finding Mecca.

I’m one of those people that thinks everyone could write a memoir. I love hearing people’s stories – seated next to me at a wedding, riding the train, hanging at sports with my kids, the dump. I want to know, basically, what led them to this exact moment, and what was the highlight reel of the stumbling blocks in their way. (Coincidentally, I don’t love small talk. I love big talk, the kind where you let it all hang out.) Then I think about, how would you craft that into a great read?

Well, just ask Mary.

She knows a thing or two since she has written three memoirs herself; The Liar’s Club and Cherry, both about her crazy upbringing in Texas with alcoholic parents and a mother who, during a psychotic break, stood over her with a kitchen knife, as well as some unfortunate run-ins with some pedophiles. She also teaches the subject to Grad Students at Syracuse University.

When I was on the first chapter of The Art of Memoir I put it down and bought Lit, her third memoir, and read it over the course of the next 2 1/2 days. (Thankfully we were on vacation in Maine and I had nap duty.) This book chronicles her going to college, getting married, then becoming a mother, and alcoholic, and a professor, then getting sober, getting divorced, and converting to Catholicism.

If it sounds like a busy ten years, it was. And she writes about it masterfully. Like Anne Lamott, this subject matter of a crazy family, a stumbling coming of age, becoming a mother, and – in discovering how hard and painful all of this is – finding a belief in the spiritual parts of themselves, and in God. Which was a total shock to both of them, having come from non-spiritual homes. (Karr says a year prior, she would have believed that she would be a church goer about as much as a pole dancer or a spy.)

Reading these ladies’ stories shifts something in me, puts something in place that was out of alignment. They’re like spiritual chiropractors. At one of Karr’s lowest points, someone said to her, try to pray for 30 days, and just see if your life gets better. And it does – she gets awarded prize money from a poetry contest she didn’t even enter when she desperately needs the money, someone lends her a car when they go abroad right when she needs one. It is an amazingly hopeful tale. The possibility that we are loved, that there is reason to hope, and that we are our own biggest problem, abound in her book. She writes at the end of Lit:

“For it feels as if I was made – from all the forms a human can take – not to prove myself worthy but to refine the worth I am formed from. To acknowledge it, own it, and spend it on others.”

All of this, of course, is why a memoir is so compelling to write, and read. In The Art of Memoir, she holds your hand in the really hard work of finding your truth, finding your voice, and finding a way to tell your story, with the best parts of your heart and mind. She cites a close friend, who asked her when she was struggling to finish Lit, “what would you write if you weren’t afraid?”

Karr acts as midwife to our stories coming into the light. Because all of this must be cloaked in flesh and blood, and be as concrete as the smell of your mother’s perfume. So what would we all write if we weren’t afraid? Because we need it. We need art to touch the parts of ourselves that others can’t. That therapy can’t, or our families.

Preach, Mary. The world needs your work. It needs the best from all of us.