The Art of the Memoir

I just reread Mary Karr’s book, The Art of Memoir. As a memoirist myself, excavating the past for the page, it was a godsend the first time around, giving me permission to write the truth, the complicated, tricky, embarrassing truth about one of the most difficult seasons of my life, scenes that haunted me. Karr’s book counseled me to write them down anyway, even if I wasn’t emotionally ready to share them because it’s the writing process that untangles the truth, revealing the inner conflict that propels any story, and I might add, begins the healing of any soul.

It’s the writing process that untangles the truth.

So, write I did, scribbling the unflinching truth, my internal editor turned off, recording raw facts and reactions, sensory details, and cultural artifacts, without concern for the order in which they manifested. Without concern for any reader. My own discovery and wholeness my only purpose. I took solace when Karr said, “The need to rout out my own inner demons is why I always start off fumbling through my own recollections.”

As actors in our own lives, we are seldom aware of an event’s meaning or impact at the time it occurs. Karr points out that the writer is often the last to know what his or her story is about. It may be a friend, a critique group member, or a beta reader who tells the writer what themes rear their head in almost every episode.

The writer is often the last to know what his or her story is about.

But as we churn out scene after scene Mary says we will find our inner enemy, which acts as the spine of the story. “However random or episodic a book seems, a blazing psychic struggle holds it together either thematically or in the way a plot would keep a novel rolling.”  

But as we churn out scene after scene Mary says we will find our inner enemy, which acts as the spine of the story.

The very memories we “gnawed on,” “the ones eating us up” are those that Karr says help us find our book’s shape.

At first this might seem too personal to be interesting to a reader outside our circle of suffering, but Karr claims telling the truth about our “inner agonies” always produces a work that reads deeper than ones based on “external whammies.”

During the writing process, Karr cautions the writer to be ready for reversals. By pinning our episodes to the page, we gain broader perspective on the whole puzzle, and we may find that what we thought was true about an event, a relationship, a person, even ourselves, may not be true at all or at least nuanced. So above all, love the people you’re writing about. “If you want revenge,” Karr quips, “hire a lawyer.”

Telling the most transparent truth we can, Karr affirms, is our contract with the reader. What they want is our story unvarnished, character flaws, misconceptions, and misadventures intimately portrayed, so they can share in our discoveries and revelations and apply them to the through line of their own lives.

Telling the most transparent truth we can is our contract with the reader.

For until we understand our own healing, we have no insight to offer others.  

It’s been six years since I first read The Art of Memoir. I’ve written and published one memoir, Teacher Dropout, and have almost completed another. And although the journey and setting of the two books are vastly different their “spines” ask similar questions. Who am I, and what am I worth? Finding the answers has been my healing. And what I have to benefit my readers.

So, who are you dear reader, and where do you find your worth?

No matter if you write a yearly Christmas letter, keep a private journal, or if you’re a memoirist of great renown, like Mary Karr, may your written words be healing for yourself and others.

“None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.”

Mary Karr

Top photo by Jan Kahanek on Unsplash