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The Art of Memoir Paperback – September 6, 2016
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“Karr is a national treasure—that rare genius who’s also a brilliant teacher. This joyful celebration of memoir packs transcendent insights with trademark hilarity. Anyone yearning to write will be inspired, and anyone passionate to live an examined life will fall in love with language and literature all over again. ” — George Saunders
Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.
For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black belt sinner,” providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre.
Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers’ experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr’s own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told— and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.
Joining such classics as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today’s most popular literary forms—a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft.
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication dateSeptember 6, 2016
- Dimensions0.7 x 5.2 x 7.9 inches
- ISBN-100062223070
- ISBN-13978-0062223074
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“Karr is a national treasure—that rare genius who’s also a brilliant teacher. This joyful celebration of memoir packs transcendent insights with trademark hilarity. Anyone yearning to write will be inspired, and anyone passionate to live an examined life will fall in love with language and literature all over again. ” — George Saunders
“Could have been called ‘The Art of Living.’” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Mary Karr has written another astonishingly perceptive, wildly entertaining, and profoundly honest book-funny, fascinating, necessary. The Art of Memoir will be the definitive book on reading and writing memoir for years to come.” — Cheryl Strayed
“Should be required reading for anyone attempting to write a memoir, but anyone who loves literature will enjoy it too.” — Wall Street Journal
“Terrific and deliciously readable guide.” — Entertainment Weekly, “Must List”
“Full of Karr’s usual wit, compassion and, perhaps most reassuringly, self-doubt. Her fans should be delighted—and they can’t go wrong reading the books she discusses, including her own.” — Washington Post
“From a contemporary luminary of the form, Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir examines our enduring drive to make memory speak and to ‘wring some truth from this godawful mess of a single life.’” — Vogue
“The Art of Memoir is passionate and irreverent-and reminds us why we love a good memoir.” — Elle
“Mary Karr strikes a vein in The Art of Memoir.” — Vanity Fair
“Karr is such fun to read-who else would combine the name Nabokov and the phrase “out the wazoo” on her very first page?” — New Yorker
“Engaging.” — Chicago Tribune
“A veritable blueprint for the genre…. Lovers of the form and aspiring scribblers alike will relish this comprehensive appreciation of and guide to ‘writing the real self.’” — O: The Oprah Magazine
“With a trio of notable memoirs (”The Liars’ Club,” “Cherry,” and “Lit”), Mary Karr is exquisitely qualified to write this book, a kind of compendium of advice, warning, and deep insight into what makes a personal history stick in a reader’s mind.” — Boston Globe
“Karr really is an artist. The Art of Memoir attests to how hard she works at getting her words just right and how deeply she understands the way great writing works.” — Slate
“Whip-smart.” — Philadelphia Inquirer
“As useful for those of us who want to be better friends and lovers as it is for those of us who want to pen our life story.” — More
“A master class on memoir, from a memoirist who pulls no punches.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Lots of practical advice, a great reading list, examples you can bite into.” — Houston Chronicle
“Karr’s own voice is consistent and authentic, as vivid, down-home, smart, profane and self-deprecating as it is in her own memoirs.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A celebration of the creative life.” — Austin American-Statesman
“Enlightening….Fresh and heartfelt….Instructs and inspires through example and a love for the art of memoir.” — Library Journal, starred review
“Karr write[s] exquisitely…and without pretense, often with raw authenticity….a must-read.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Snappy and witty, humorous just when it needs to be, yet plainspoken in the best way.” — Shelf Awareness
“Karr’s sassy Texas wit and her down-to-earth observations about both the memoir form and how to approach it combine to make for lively and inspiring reading. A generous and singularly insightful examination of memoir.” — Kirkus
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Mary Karr is the author of three award-winning, bestselling memoirs: The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit, as well as The Art of Memoir, also a New York Times bestseller. She received Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships for poetry and is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (September 6, 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0062223070
- ISBN-13 : 978-0062223074
- Item Weight : 6.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 0.7 x 5.2 x 7.9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #21,035 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8 in General Books & Reading
- #9 in Women Writers in Women Studies
- #850 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Mary Karr's first memoir, The Liar's Club, kick-started a memoir revolution and won nonfiction prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, it rode high on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, becoming an annual "best book" there and for The New Yorker, People, and Time. Recently Entertainment Weekly rated it number four in the top one hundred books of the past twenty-five years. Her second memoir, Cherry, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, also hit bestseller and "notable book" lists at the New York Times and dozens of other papers nationwide. Her most recent book in this autobiographical series, Lit: A Memoir, is the story of her alcoholism, recovery, and conversion to Catholicism. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays. Other grants include the Whiting Award and Radcliffe's Bunting Fellowship. She is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.
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In her book, The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr points to other motivations, somewhere between the writer “trying to make sense of the past” and “readers thirsty for reality” (xiv). Memoir invites the reader into the private life of the author in a verbal strip-tease, undertaken for catharsis or paid therapy (xxi). Something anyone can aspire to writing memoir, even if the readers may be limited to an immediate circle of friends and family. The primary requirement is having memories that you are willing to analyze against a particular theme and to share with readers. These memories need not be absolute truth, but they need to be spoken with an authentic voice.
Karr emphasizes voice as the authenticator of good memoir, writing: “Each great memoir lives or dies based 100 percent on voice.” (35) The truth of memoir is not absolute—sworn on a Bible—truth, but rather a more interesting subjective truth—truth told with an authentic voice. It is subjective, in part, because we lie more often to ourselves than we do to other people. Karr validates her own accounts with the people she writes about (5). It is interesting, in part, because an authentic voice embeds the veils that we use to cover our inadequacies. Uncovering the veils and exposing the lies they cover up is painful, as Karr explains: “You have to lance a boil and suffer its stench as infection drains off.” (12) Yet, this catharsis liberates our true selves, a necessary step in healing and in personal growth, as Karr admits: “I often barely believe myself, for I grew up suspicious of my own perceptions” (22).
Part of authentic voice is admitting your motivation in writing. Karr argues: “Unless you confess your own emotional stakes in a project, why should a reader have any?” (97) While this advice might seem to be a terribly female observation to make—why can’t I just lay out my hypothesis, you say?—communications professors often admonish their students that complete communication requires both an idea and an emotion. Authenticity requires complete expression—why is that hypothesis so important that you spent at least a year examining it in great detaiI? Chances are good that the emotional stake is already substantial and its substance needs only to be recognized in your writing. A novelist might refer to this stake as an emotional hook to grab the reader.
Karr’s voice shows ironic tension. She is consciously literary—dropping great quotes from famous memoirists and dotting her work with cutesy new ways of expression. The tension arises when you see her photographed wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots more fitting of her Texas upbringing. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” as Shakespeare writes in Hamlet. Voiced tension is a source of conflict and, as such, is interesting.
Cowboy boots aside, Karr writes prescriptively in 24 chapters, each with its own theme. A particularly important theme in her writing comes in chapter 6: Sacred Carnality. While one’s mind naturally runs to carnal, as in carnal knowledge, Karr uses carnal to mean sensual in description, as in the five senses—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling (71). For those of us more comfortable in non-fiction, analytical writing, this carnality is necessarily forced, as she readily admits (75). By utilizing carnal description to move the action, dialog can be used more like a spotlight.
Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir is helpful addition to any writer’s library. Karr’s cites from numerous famous memoirists(check out the appendix listing) aptly makes the point that memoir is a wider genre than the usual political and celebrity autobiographies, and the creative potential in memoir is greater than the usual A-B-C chronologies. I would never have guessed, for example, that a favorite film of mine, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) was based on a memoir by William Herr: Dispatches (1977). Karr’s book has already encouraged me to purchase a memoir that she recommended ; it has been a great encouragement in my own memoir project; and I have already gifted this book to a friend. Great book; read it.
References
Angelou, Maya. 2009. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Ballantine Books.
Herr, William. 1977. Dispatches. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
The Art of Memoir is not necessarily what the title suggests—that is, it’s not a how-to book about memoir. It’s even greater and more exotic than that—it’s a powerful literary criticism of the form. Karr is very generous in her perspective, sharing many examples and excerpts of other famous writers and contemporaries who, like her, have made the memoir form come alive. These writers include Tobias Woolf, Maxine Hong Kingston, Geoffrey Woolf, Maya Angelou, Kathryn Harrison, as well as one of her very favorite writers, Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote the book Speak Memory.
Karr shares many gems in this book, one of which is: “Each great memoir lives or dies based 100 percent on voice.” I could not agree more. “For the reader,” she adds, “the voice has to exist from the first sentence.”
Having had the distinct pleasure of meeting Karr recently, I feel that I am at an advantage as I hear her vocalize the essence of this book. Her words are alive, both on the page and in person. She’s one of those rare writers who writes the way she speaks, and she will be the first to humbly admit that the sign of a great memoirist is one who speaks like they write, and in a way that brings their readers closer to them. This book is highly recommended, regardless of your preferred genre.
Memoir brought Mary Karr to the barn dance of big-time American letters and she waltzes away with New Journalism. A book called “The Art of Memoir” might reserve its key “THIS is how it’s done” chapter to a memoir. Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” is a great book by any measure, but it is not a memoir. “Dispatches” owes more to Norman Mailer’s non-fiction than to Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Wright or Maya Angelou. A memoir is personal through and through: personal part of town, personal events, personal slant, personal enlightenment. In “Dispatches” Michael Herr shares the nightmare swamp of the Vietnam War with millions of U.S. soldiers. New Journalism implies that author’s private, personal, quirky, memoiresque take on the events is a central piece of the machinery. It is weird when an organization or a prominent person marginalizes the genre at hand to celebrate a genre containing an example of flat-out better writing, though from another species. See: American Society of Illustrators awarding their Gold Medal to an abstract expressionist piece of commercial art causing 99% of membership working in a realistic or quasi-realistic vein to go “WTF?” See: Woody Allen on “clubs”
In our current PC climate, 30 years in the brewing, a time when child molesters are vilified, imprisoned, cast out of the social order, to spend a chapter singing the praises of smarmy, aristocratic seducer par-excellence, Vladimir Nabokov is sleepy. Vlad loses more cred for his lubricious attempts at seductive scintillating syntax than to his praise of predation upon the underaged. Is kissing Vlad’s ring still a requirement in all academia.
“The Art of Memoir” is an excellent guide to memoir writing and to any sort of writing. MK’s emphasis on the act of re-writing - revision is worth ten times the price of the book. “The Art of Memoir” is brimming with wisdom old and new.