Mary Karr and the power of the narrative“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.” (Salman Rushdie, “One Thousand Days in a Balloon,” New York Times, December 12, 1991)
This was the opening quote to a book entitled The Story of Your Life by Mandy Aftel. I chose this book to read on the craft of memoir for a course I took years ago entitled Women’s Lives. I really had no idea what it was about. I knew it would involve writing and women and a well-loved teacher named Polly Glover. That was enough for my nineteen-year-old self but I still reap the benefits of this course over ten years later.
Reading Mary Karr’s memoirs has been the perfect excuse to delve back into this world. I had always heard of Karr and Liars’ Club, but I kind of shy away from stuff everybody’s reading and wait until the hullabaloo passes. How lucky was I when I learned that Mary Karr was coming to Lemuria and I could read all three of her memoirs? . . . a course in one woman’s life. So I began to wonder why memoirs appeal to so many people. What was it about Karr that caused such a strong response from readers? Was it just another rough childhood story or was it something more, something that would endure?
The 10th anniversary edition of The Liars’ Club includes an introduction by Karr, a reflection on the response to Liars’ Club over the past ten years. Karr writes:
“If The Liars’ Club began as a love letter to my less-than-perfect clan, it spawned (on its own terms) love letters from around the world. Its publication constructed for me–in midlife, unexpectedly–what I hankered for so desperately for as a dreamy kid comforted only by reading: that mythic village of like-minded souls who bloom together by sharing old tales–the kind that fire you up and set you loose, the true kind.” (xvi)
I wish I had more time write on this subject matter for there are so many women writers who have shared, who have bared all, blazed new trails, who have opened the door to discussion on many taboo topics, who have created community through their words. Maya Angelo, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Virgina Woolf, Anne Moody, Alice Walker . . . and Mary Karr. They are mothers and sisters and friends and mentors when there is a space to be filled, their words wait for the open door.
Sometimes, when I have something tough to do and when space allows (no, a Kindle won’t do), I put the only thing I have tangible from these women in my bag, Maya Angelou’s Letter to my Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life, Alice Walker’s The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart and In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Like Karr writes, it is some sort of mini-village I carry with me, a group of women who feed a confidence and bravery to move forward. The essayist Kennedy Fraser expresses a similar need:
“I felt very lonely then, self-absorbed, shut off. I needed all this murmured chorus, this continuum of true-life stories, to pull me through. They were like mothers and sisters to me, these literary women, many of them already dead; more than my own family, they seemed to stretch out a hand.”
You are invited to meet Mary Karr this coming Wednesday for a signing and reading at 5:00 and 5:30 respectively. Her third memoir, Lit, is now out in paperback.
Written by Lisa
4 responses so far ↓
1 Ellen Ann Fentress // Jul 17, 2010 at 4:41 pm
For Mary Karr, faith is one thing, a frontal lobotomy another. Human experience—and it doesn’t have to be exemplary–still captivates her. For example, she kicked off her Lemuria reading with a six-thousand-year-old Greek curse as a warm-up crowd pleaser. (“May you wake up in a gelid surf, your teeth, already cracked into the shingle now set rattling by the wind while…you puke brine reeking of dead fish…”)
She gets Archilochos’s rage, just as she got the wondrous, the comic and the human in her chaotic, neglected childhood in her classic The Liars’ Club. Karr’s commitment to unflinching truth girds her new book Lit, an account of her own alcoholism and becoming Catholic.
Is Karr’s capacity for empathy limitless? Maybe, since she even loves Twitter, or Twaddle, as she calls it. The French Surrealists in 1920s Paris would have had fun with a thoroughly modern idea like Facebook or Twitter, and so is Karr, she said.
I’m following her twaddles, which alternate between musings on great writing (the fifteenth-century Indian poet Kabir: “Now you’re tangled up in others and have forgotten what you once knew”) and holding contests for the best eavesdropped conversation (the winner at Target, an overheard father to his child: “There will be no more fucking mooses, do you understand? This is the last moose.”)
Karr, a sought-after lecturer on writing at Harvard, Brown and other tony venues, took time after her Lemuria reading to meet with our Millsaps Community-Enrichment creative nonfiction class. She settled in on a pink sofa in the Southern fiction nook and chewed on both our class’s cheese crackers and questions. The queen of U.S. letters hung in to answer every last question on the craft of writing from all of us there. She never checked the time and seemed to be having a ball. Ninety minutes later, Karr hugged our necks, poured herself a caffeine-free Coke for the road from our refreshment table and came to the well-deserved end of her day. Or so I thought. Then here came a new twaddle 21 minutes later—a thank-you.
2 Susan Cushman // Jul 19, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Nice reflection, Lisa. I was going to come hear Karr at Lemuria with my friend, Ellen Ann (see previous comment) but I ended up at her reading at Square Books in Oxford, instead. She’s my favorite memoirist, and it was a joy to finally meet her in person. Your readers might enjoy my post over at Pen and Palette: http://wwwpenandpalette-susancushman.blogspot.com/2010/07/lit-accommodating-joy.html
3 All Lit Up // Jul 20, 2010 at 9:38 am
[...] here are Billie and Lisa’s blogs on Mary Karr. Written by [...]
4 Indulging in the memoir // Jan 25, 2011 at 5:03 am
[...] A while back, in preparation for Mary Karr’s visit to Lemuria, I began to think hard about why so many people are drawn to the memoir. I think we all know why, but I wanted to put it into words. I reflected on a long-past course in women’s memoir, flipped through some of the course reading and was assured by this quote from Kennedy Fraser: “I felt very lonely then, self-absorbed, shut off. I needed all this murmured chorus, this continuum of true-life stories, to pull me through. They were like mothers and sisters to me, these literary women, many of them already dead; more than my own family, they seemed to stretch out a hand.” (Read more of this blog, The Power of the Narrative, here) [...]
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