Reflect much?

Have you read Mary Karr?  If you’re a CNFer or a poet, you probably have.  As memoirs go, The Liar’s Club seems ubiquitously thought of as a staple of the canon, and with good reason.  I read that one a few years ago and just finished her second memoir, Cherry, recently.  And it was good.  It was so good I am now dying to get my hands on Lit, Karr’s most recent memoir.  So good that when I went to my office to select my next read, everything that I’d been so excited to tear into seemed lame (I did eventually decide on a Jane Smiley novel, and it’s not lame). 

Cherry picks up sort of where Liar’s Club left off, timeline-wise, though in style it’s quite distinct.  Not only does Karr present her adolescent experience in the present tense, but also in the second person.  The book describes a girl’s sexual coming of age, which sounds like something that’s been done; Karr points out that this is not entirely true, that there really aren’t many memoirs out there dealing with teenage sexuality and all the nuances and falsehoods and experiments and fantasizing that go along with it. In an interview over at the Paris Review, Karr says “It may be a problem of language.  When I started Cherry, I realized there were no words to describe an awakening female libido.  Boys have these childlike words like chubby and woody, but the parlance for female genitalia and female desires is too porno.”  So boys tease each other about wet dreams and blue balls, and girls…well, what do girls do? Read more »

Samuel Johnson Isn't Afraid of Telling It Like It Is

It’s satisfying to have someone smarter than you are conducting interviews, to have them ask questions you couldn’t conjure up yourself. But sometimes the most satisfying questions are the simple ones, the ones you’ve been wondering about for a long time.

It isn’t like I’ve been repeatedly asking why Mary Karr wrote her memoirs. But I have often wondered why, in general, people feel the urge to write memoirs. Some reasons make perfect sense—such as Cheryl Strayed’s answer on the AWP panel I saw in February. Strayed moved from fiction to memoir when she realized her real mother and her real mother’s story were becoming conflated with the mother and mother’s story in her novel. One morning she woke up sobbing, knowing that she needed to write what really happened in order to preserve her real mother in her own memory.

I wonder if this is often the reason for turning to the truth in writing: feeling the need to preserve something sacred. I also wonder if sometimes the process of writing a memoir is helpful in making sense of something that one can’t otherwise make good enough sense of. The act of putting it into a greater context can help highlight the grand patterns.

I was surprised to read Mary Karr’s response to an interview question posed by Amanda Fortini for the Paris Review about why she wrote her first memoir. When Fortini asked: Read more »

We could probably convince Mark Knopfler that writing a book isn’t exactly “money for nothin’” and these authors aren’t playing “the guitar on MTV,” but other than that it’s pretty close to the Dire Straits song. Okay, so you might have to use your imagination to hear “Hawaiian noises” and see “bangin’ on the bongos like a chimpanzee,” but as music artists of earlier decades had to make videos for MTV to create hits, authors now put book trailers on YouTube to keep up with the Joneses—actually, the Roberts and the Pattersons. In other words, it’s not enough for writers to worry whether we are photogenic enough for the book jacket portrait, now we can also be anxious about appearing natural on film.   

Pamela Paul of the New York Times wrote an article earlier this month about the book trailer phenomena:

…the trailer is fast becoming an essential component of online marketing. Asked to draw on often nonexistent acting skills, authors are holding forth for anything from 30 seconds to 6 minutes, frequently to the tune of stock guitar strumming, soulful violin or klezmer music. And now, those who once worried about no one reading their books can worry about no one watching their trailers. (A mother still nursing her 8-year-old: 25,864,943 views; recent best-selling maternal memoirist: 5,124 views.) 

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