Mary Karr Boulder in Your Throat Art of Memoir
'The Art of Memoir,' past Mary Karr
When y'all purchase an independently reviewed volume through our site, we earn an affiliate committee.
Why not say what happened? All right, then: St. Augustine stole some pears. Kathryn Harrison had sexual activity with her father. Tobias Wolff didn't do much of annihilation to disturb his sleep, it would seem, but he even so managed to turn his adolescence into beautiful, reflective music.
The vogue for memoir, like all vogues, comes and goes. Merely the impulse perseveres. Celebrities, addicts, abuse victims, politicians, soldiers, grieving children: Everyi has a story to tell and a conviction that the world wants to hear information technology — and ofttimes enough, if the best-seller lists are any indication, the globe does.
Mary Karr has told three stories the world wanted to hear. In "The Liars' Gild" (1995), she wrote about her hardscrabble Texas upbringing, including her rape by a neighborhood boy and molestation by a bodyguard; in "Reddish" (2000), well-nigh her adolescent coming-of-age; and in "Lit" (2009), about her adult recovery from alcoholism and embrace of Catholicism. (Given the inherently confessional nature of memoir, it may be no coincidence that so many of its most successful practitioners have been Catholic to some degree — Karr, Wolff, Harrison and of course Augustine, just also Mary McCarthy, David Carr, Mary Gordon, Patricia Hampl, Frank McCourt — or that even non-Catholic memoirists slip and so easily into the churchly narrative of penitence and redemption.)
All three of Karr'south memoirs accept been best sellers, and for 25 years she has taught literature and artistic writing at Syracuse University. So she would seem equally well positioned equally anybody in our selfie-besotted age to explain the art of memoir, which is just what she sets out to do in her new book, obviously titled "The Art of Memoir." It is not, alas, a very skillful book. Repetitive, unorganized, unsure of its audition or tone, it can't decide whether it wants to be a how-to guide or a piece of work of disquisitional analysis. I would have voted for analysis myself, partly because Karr proves to be an fantabulous reader of other people's work and partly because the genre doesn't readily lend itself to the reductive prescriptions of how-to: There's no ane mode to write a memoir, any more than at that place is one mode to alive a life.
Karr recognizes this — "Every writer worth her salt is sui generis," she concedes at the outset — and she seems a scrap hamstrung by information technology. On the advice front, she pads the book with chipper lists and pop quizzes and general encouraging bromides. Her most insistent tip is the somewhat tepid suggestion that aspiring memoirists keep their work "lecherous," by which she means not sexual (despite the obvious commercial advantages that might bring) but grounded in details that appeal to the senses. For most writers that's decent communication, if not especially revelatory, merely for memoirists it runs headlong into another of Karr'southward sensible, seemingly unobjectionable guidelines: the injunction not to make things upwardly.
"Deceit in memoir irks me so badly," she complains. "It'south the busted liars who talk most volubly most the fuzzy line between nonfiction and fiction. Their anything-goes message has come to boss the airwaves effectually memoir" — an outcome that, for Karr, has moral too every bit literary implications: "The popular, scoffing presumption that memory's solely concocted by cocky-serving fantasy and everyone's trying to scudge has maybe helped to bog downwardly our commonage moral machinery."
It's true that fabricated memoirs take taken a lot of estrus in contempo years, and rightly then. Just all of the shouting near James Frey and Margaret Seltzer and their ilk tends to obscure an essential, elementary betoken: Everybody is, in fact, trying to scudge. Even nonfraudulent memoirs, by scrupulous writers making good-faith efforts to reconstruct their pasts, are by nature unreliable — every bit tenuous and conditional and riddled with honest error as memory itself. And washed right, that's exactly what makes them so thrilling.
The best memoirs, Karr's among them, are at to the lowest degree implicitly about the invention of the cocky, how we sew together a cohesive (if fluid) identity from a jumble of experiences and influences and, yes, imperfect memories. It is incommunicable to talk about memoir without talking about memory, and it's impossible to talk about retention without talking, at least a little, about neurology. "Subjectivity is congenital into the very nature of retention, and follows from its ground and mechanisms in the human encephalon," Oliver Sacks wrote in a 2013 essay almost the elusive quality of recollection. He knew what he was talking about: In the same essay, he discussed his realization that an event he had vividly remembered and described in his memoir "Uncle Tungsten" — the dropping of a Nazi bomb on his London neighborhood when he was a child — had in fact happened while he was safely ensconced at boarding school more than 100 kilometers away. He could not have remembered the flop, and yet he did. "In the absence of outside confirmation," he wrote, "at that place is no piece of cake manner of distinguishing a genuine memory or inspiration, felt as such, from those that have been borrowed or suggested, between what the psychoanalyst Donald Spence calls 'historical truth' and 'narrative truth.' " Why not say what happened? Because one-half the time we don't have a inkling.
Memoir is far more than most narrative truth than the historical kind, of class — indeed, that's the go-to justification for writers caught fabricating. Only they can assert that defence in the first place only considering most readers take that personal history is non history, and memoir is not journalism. It is, equally the critic and professor Ben Yagoda notes in his useful volume "Memoir: A History" (2009), "more literary than literal." (Yagoda is referring specifically to Tobias Wolff's great memoir, "This Boy's Life," merely the description holds for the genre in general.) In borrowing the techniques of fiction to dramatize the self — scene, grapheme, dialogue, the occasional epiphany — memoirists invariably make things up, not because they're immoral but because all of u.s.a. make things up all the time, wittingly or not: to fill up in gaps, to add together color or context, to animate inanimate or isolated memories.
The first few pages of "The Liars' Club" are instructive in this regard. Karr memorably opens on "a unmarried instant surrounded by dark": herself at age 7, resisting the family unit doctor's attempts to examine her while strangers mill nearly in the living room. "It took three decades for that instant to unfreeze," she writes, so she proceeds to unfreeze it for usa, setting the scene in motion as if she'southward breathing onto a mobile above a crib. The strangers in the house plow out to include the law: "The doorway framed the enormous backlit form of Sheriff Watson, who held my sis, then 9, with ane stout arm. She had her pink pajamas on and her legs wrapped around his waist. She fiddled with his badge with a concentration too intense for the bodily interest such a thing might hold for her." So Karr turns the volume up, and we hear the stomp of boots, the ebbing of an ambulance siren, the depression growl exterior of Nipper, her father'southward dog.
Equally memoir goes, it's a terrific start because it so purposely re-enacts the very procedure of how we retrieve the past. Or, more precisely, how we reconstruct information technology. "Every deed of memory is to some caste an act of imagination," the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman has written, and it'due south worth noting that the details in Karr'south account that feel about imagined — most suspect, that is, in terms of historical truth — are the very ones that give it its "lecherous" texture: the pink pajamas, the sheriff's badge, the growling domestic dog. I don't dubiousness Karr's overall story or its effect on her self-identity, merely I don't know if her sister'due south pajamas that dark were actually pink and I don't believe Karr really knows either. "At that place is an inherent and irresolvable conflict," Yagoda writes in "Memoir," "between the capabilities of memory and the demands of narrative." And in memoirs as in life, narrative usually wins.
Fiction writers, unsurprisingly, often have a keen grasp of this. Hither's Alice Munro, for instance, in "What Is Remembered": "She would have preferred another scene, and that was the one she substituted, in her memory." And Elizabeth Hardwick, in "Sleepless Nights": "If only i knew what to remember or pretend to remember." And then why (besides talent, I hateful) does Munro get the Nobel Prize while James Frey gets the cone of shame? For one affair, of course: Munro labels her work fiction while Frey tried to laissez passer his off every bit life. But if memoir is partly about the invention of the self, it must be said that in forming our identities anybody is guilty at times of lies of omission or committee; and even outright deception nonetheless says something near our secret wishes or aspirations or embarrassments, nearly how we wish to be seen in the world. Yagoda, quoting the psychologist C.R. Barclay, notes that autobiographical memories are oftentimes "true merely inaccurate"; past the aforementioned token, you could argue that frauds like Frey's are false just authentic.
Are they really, though? Every bit Phillip Lopate notes in a marvelous essay in his book "To Prove and to Tell" (2013), "Facts and truths are not so carve up; they are often plant walking hand in hand." Lies like Frey'southward thing, Lopate suggests, because "facts have implications, which, it seems to me, are ignored at the nonfiction writer'southward peril. . . . Making things up, bending the facts, throws off my attempt to get every bit shut every bit possible to the shape underlying experience or to the psychology that flows from the precisely real." Our lies might reveal something nearly u.s.a., but we take to acknowledge them before we can brainstorm to understand what that is. And so if nosotros condemn Frey and applaud Munro, it's because his "nonfiction" hides the deeper truth while her fiction works hard to reveal it, to show us how memory really operates. Like Karr, and like all interesting memoirists, Munro is constantly interrogating the past to get at the real: We accept ways of making you speak, memory.
To Karr's credit, in "The Fine art of Memoir" she reserves her greatest enthusiasm for work that recognizes just how glace and elusive our own stories are. "The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage," she writes, singling out amongst others Nabokov and Michael Herr and Maxine Hong Kingston. "Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story. . . . That's partly why memoir is in its ascendancy — not because it'south not corrupt, merely because the all-time ones openly confess the nature of their corruption."
The matter most the cocky is that it never stops forming, so fifty-fifty the most honest memoirs are necessarily conditional and incomplete, compromised as soon as they're pinned wriggling to the page. That's as truthful for Karr equally anyone else, of course, and it may explain why she seems so hesitant in advising readers how to arroyo their own memoirs. "Though 'The Liars' Social club' rang true to me when I wrote it, from this juncture information technology seems to accept sprung from a land of loving delusion about my family," she resolutely admits. "The self who penned that volume formed the filter for those events. I didn't fabricate stuff, but today, other scenes I'd add together might tell a less forgiving story." All memoirs are lies, even those that tell the truth. They tin't help it, because the longer we alive the more our fixed pasts keep changing.
rosenthalspip1955.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/books/review/the-art-of-memoir-by-mary-karr.html