At the
Tucson Book Festival in 2018 I got to watch Mary Karr and Amy Tan in a comic
tag-team match on the subject of memoir. They had a good-natured competition
about which of them had the most fucked-up family (their words) and agreed that
such a family had proved to be advantageous—more than that, a gold mine—for
each of them in the writing of their memoirs. Mary Karr doesn’t exactly say in The Art of Memoir (2015) that you have
to have a fucked-up family in order to write memoir, but it’s an almost audible
subtext.
She
begins by warning us that memory can fail, and tells about starting the
semester in her memoir class at Syracuse by staging an event—a conflict with
another teacher about the use of the room—and then asking her students to write
an account of it. The misremembered details are intended to be a lesson about
how memory can deceive us about events that happened ten minutes ago, let alone
in a distant childhood. Her answer: do the best you can and send your
manuscript to folks you’ve written about. She writes that all the memoirists
she respects do this. She herself is a stickler for trying to tell the truth
about the past as nearly as it can be recovered.
She
suggests you test yourself to see if you should even try to write a memoir.
Close your eyes, relax, try to clear your mind, and then revisit “the memory
you’re scared to set down.” Try to recreate all of its sense stimuli. Let the
memory play out. Then open your eyes. How do you feel? If you are an emotional
wreck, she says you might not be ready. If you’re too calm, or couldn’t really recreate much, you might not be ready,
either.
Voice
has to be the writer herself speaking “not with objective authority but with
subjective curiosity.” She inserts a chapter on the very distinctive voice of
Nabokov, in Speak, Memory!--he breaks
most rules, gives no dialogue, has few scenes, and is not someone with whom the
reader identifies, but he invests objects with great significance, brings us
back to a repetition or echo of where we started (Karr calls it twinning), and excels at what she calls
carnality. She means what appeals to the five senses, and she considers it one
of memoir’s desiderata. It should evoke place and name names—be particular.
She
returns to the topic of truth in discussing some frauds—Wilkomirski and Frey.
She does not believe that truth is relative. Karr likes particular words and
phrases—“out the wazoo…scudge [meaning fool
or scam]…duller than a rubber knife”…to
twig [meaning to catch on]"—and she
repeats them.
Memoir
for her means a life story that’s ordered around a psychic struggle—to be
whole, to remember the past as in Nabokov’s case, to reconcile two worlds as in
Maxine Hong Kingston’s and Amy Tan’s, to find an identity as in Harry Crews’s.
She uses the elephant shooting scene in Orwell to illustrate the struggle he is
having with colonialism and his role in it. She tells how she checked her own
memory and gauged the responses of her family by consulting them before she
published her own first memoir. One of her points about describing people and
their bad habits is “give information in the form you received it”; instead of
labelling people, describe exactly how you discovered she was an alcoholic and
he a thief.
She
describes her long struggle to find her own voice, the many false starts in
form (poetry) and models (Eliot, Stevens), and the feeling that she’s found it
nine months into the first chapter of her first book. This passage seems to me
to capture her voice.
As a kid, when I saw my mother’s mouth
become a straight line and heard her speak in a Yankee accent as her posture
went super straight, I knew she was tanked. The rat scrabble this set off in my
head, as I tried to figure out how to stop the chaos approaching us like a
runaway train, was torment.
There is no profanity, there, but then she uses profanity
less than it seems. This is most of her advice: the truth, the voice, the inner
conflict, the importance of revision, and the Karrnality.
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