Mary Karr is eminently qualified to write The Art of the Memoir. Not only has she written three magnificent books in the genre--The Liar's Club, Cherry and Lit--but she's also someone who has "cherished the form as long and as hard as anybody," having taught a class in memoir for years at Syracuse University. Karr combines these strengths to create a book that discusses what a memoir is, which writers did it really well and how those interested in writing one might go about doing so.
The Art of Memoir is snappy and witty, humorous just when it needs to be, yet plainspoken in the best way. "[W]riting a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it's done right... there's suffering involved." To do so, one must find The Story (yours and no one else's) and be willing to tell it in the "truest, most beautiful way." Karr hopes to "give you the scuba fins and a face mask and more oxygen for your travels" through what she calls "the watery element of memory."
As she instructs, advises and guides, Karr draws upon both her own experience and the work of a few authors whom she regularly re-reads. For instance, she points out that Maxine Hong Kingston's "oddly ethereal vision" in Woman Warrior "helped forge the genre of memoir as we know it"; and describes how Kathryn Harrison (The Kiss) was "inwardly scalded" into writing "one of the bravest memoirs in recent memory," about her father's sexual abuse of her. And using Michael Herr's seminal war memoir, Dispatches, as exemplary of the form, Karr offers a close reading to show explicitly what he does and how he does it.
From these shining illustrations of the craft at its best, The Art of Memoir gathers tools for the aspiring writer, but Karr opines that doubt may be the memoirist's greatest asset, or at the very least, a penchant for rethinking one's assumptions about the past. This dovetails nicely with the writer's need to revise, to keep writing. Karr confesses that she spent nine months writing The Liar's Club's first chapter and threw away 1,200 finished pages of another memoir. She takes heart, though, in G.H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology, her favorite memoir; every time she reads it, the book showers her with "sparkles like a Disney fairy." The Art of Memoir too sparkles, and teaches, and enthralls. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher
Shelf Talker: Esteemed memoirist Mary Karr expounds on the genre's greatest books and offers wise counsel for writing one.