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Mary Karr

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The Art of Memoir Kindle Edition

by Mary Karr (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 1,537 ratings

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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 length

256 pages
Language

English
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Harper
Publication date

September 15, 2015
File size

1178 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of September 2015: Thanks to celebrated works like The Liar’s Club, Lit, and Cherry, many would argue that Mary Karr put memoirs on the map. She has a thing or two to say about that in The Art of Memoir, a distillation of over 30 years of writing and teaching the form. While it certainly should be required reading for anyone wanting to become the next Cheryl Strayed (whom Karr mentored), it has much on offer for those of us who have no intentions of laying ourselves bare on the page. By examining her favorite memoirs in her signature smart, irreverent style--and with contagious affection--Karr explains why they resonate with us: Memoirs are a means to make sense of a life; they reveal the sometimes skewed ways in which we see ourselves, and how those perceptions betray our frailties, and our strengths. If you’re wondering if Karr touches on charlatan “memoirists” like infamous Oprah punching bag, James Frey, she does. But only to point out the important distinctions between the malleability of memory, and simply making stuff up. Also, why are we so gullible in believing those fictions? A warning that your reading list is going to grow the further you venture into this book—Karr’s love for memoirs like Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior just oozes off the page, and it’s hard not getting some of that on you. You’ll be better off if you just let it. --Erin Kodicek

Review

Full of Karr's usual wit, compassion and, perhaps most reassuringly, self-doubt.

-- "Washington Post"

A master class on the art of the memoir.

-- "New York Times Book Review"

Examines our enduring drive to make memory speak and to 'wring some truth from this godawful mess of a single life.'

-- "Vogue"

Fresh and heartfelt...As a writing guide, this book is a success. Never is Karr dull or didactic; rather, the author instructs and inspires through example and a love for the art of memoir.

-- "Library Journal (starred review)"

Karr has written another astonishingly perceptive, wildly entertaining, and profoundly honest book-funny, fascinating, necessary.

-- "Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author"

Mary Karr reads...with the forthright delivery of the seasoned professor that she is...Karr's considered and straightforward delivery [provides a] thoroughly listenable and interesting audiobook.

-- "AudioFile"

Reminds us not only how compelling personal stories can be, but how, in the hands of a master, they can transmute into the highest art.

-- "Boston Globe"

A generous and singularly insightful examination of memoir.

-- "Kirkus Reviews"

Should be required reading for anyone attempting to write a memoir, but anyone who loves literature will enjoy it too.

-- "Wall Street Journal"

This joyful celebration of memoir packs transcendent insights with trademark hilarity.

-- "George Saunders, New York Times bestselling author"

Passionate and irreverent-and reminds us why we love a good memoir.

-- "Elle"

Karr, the author of three lauded memoirs...offers her wisdom in this instructive guide to the genre...Karr lends her characteristic trueness and 'you-ness' to the subject of writing memoirs, wisely (and quite often humorously) guiding readers in their understanding and experience of the art.

-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

Mary Karr is the author of three award-winning, bestselling memoirs: The Liars' Club, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Cherry, which was selected as a notable book by book reviews nationwide; and Lit, which was one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year (and made virtually every other Best of the Year list) and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays. She is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00RLQXBYS
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; Reprint edition (September 15, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 15, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1178 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 256 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #211,813 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #22 in Nonfiction Writing Reference
- #41 in Books & Reading Literary Criticism
- #53 in Women Author Literary Criticism

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4.5 1,537 ratings

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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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Stephen W. Hiemstra ﻦ

Karr Voices Memoir Clearly

Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2017

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Writing a memoir evokes a special brand of fear. No matter how you approach the topic, the fear is that your life story is not worthy of being told and the mere attempt to tell it is to be guilty of exaggeration and pride. No matter how good the writing, the fear is that you do not stand in the company of presidents, kings, and celebrities. Against this fear, one can only aspire to write clearly with distinction and to seek out a good book or two to aid in this vain enterprise.

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.

18 people found this helpful

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Diana Raab

like her, have made the memoir form come alive

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2016

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It’s a treat to read an analytical book by an author who knows more about penning a memoir than any other living writer—after all, she’s the rare writer who has written three: The Liar’s Club, Cherry, and Lit. Furthermore, this book offers a broad perspective of someone who has had a full life as a wife, mother, therapy patient, writer, spiritual seeker, and alcoholic—while always living with lust and deep curiosity.

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.

5 people found this helpful

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Jim Blake, Jr.

Perplexing Excellence

Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2015

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It is odd these days when the work of our most celebrated writers goes unedited or is edited by people too young or too narrowly experienced or too timid in the face of reputation to catch entire realms of error - All contemporary published writers suffer from this, present subject included. All writers need an editor and there are very few left in the publishing world. Robert Caro goes un-edited, Stephen Jay Gould, David Foster Wallace - no editor in sight. Forests would have been spared and legions of readers spared countless pages, if editors had done their job.

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.

12 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Renata de Lara Muylaert

Good guidance

Reviewed in Brazil on February 3, 2022

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Good material! I like how the author expresses her ideas, even when she tells stories non-linearly, which happens at many moments. It gives a personal and unique tone to her narrative and opinions.

Ms. T. Stuart

If you want to write memoir, this is a handbook on how to do it. Highly recommended.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 10, 2022

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Mary Karr shows you how to nail voice, by showing you hers. She dissects Nabokov's technique, and line by line, Michael Kerr's Dispatches. She explains what to leave in, and what to leave out, discusses mining for truth, getting out of your own way, and avoiding bringing your readers down. This is a masterclass in writing memoir. Highly recommended.

susan

Memoirs are becoming popular

Reviewed in Australia on March 18, 2024

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I found Mary Karr's book helpful to me in understanding issues and matters to consider when writing my memoir. I greatly appreciated her knowledge.

One person found this helpful

Samantha

Beyond Expectations

Reviewed in Canada on March 5, 2017

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This is not a how to manual for writing novices. However, it is an incredible, well-written, well-organized, powerful exposition on the creative genius and hard work behind good memoir writing. It should be necessary reading for any memoirist; however, it is also a fascinating illumination for avid readers on what makes a memoir (or fiction) work well. Using exemplary examples from great memoirists, Karr illustrates her ideas with clarity. I was compelled to add some memoirs to my wish list whose subject matter I wouldn't ordinarily be interested in. Immediately after finishing this book, I began reading an autobiography that I'd been excited about. From the beginning, I found myself wishing the author had read The Art of Memoir.

7 people found this helpful

Michelle Cornish

Full of great writing advice!

Reviewed in Canada on October 12, 2019

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I first borrowed this book from my library but had to get my own copy. After reading Mary's great advice, I knew I would be referring to this book over and over. There are so many gems in here, I think all writers, whether writing a memoir or not, will benefit from reading this book. Mary has a great sense of humour which also makes this a fun read!

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