{"id":629,"date":"2010-07-28T19:23:59","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T19:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2010\/07\/28\/mary-karr-memoir-and-the-truth-mayborn-conference-2010\/"},"modified":"2025-02-27T16:59:32","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T16:59:32","slug":"mary-karr-memoir-and-the-truth-mayborn-conference-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2010\/07\/28\/mary-karr-memoir-and-the-truth-mayborn-conference-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Mary Karr on truth: "the least of my problems as a memoirist, as a writer, is getting my facts right""},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n Author Mary Karr showed up Friday in Grapevine, Texas, in the middle of a thunderstorm to talk about telling the truth. The first keynote speaker at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference<\/a><\/em>, Karr addressed an after-dinner crowd of hundreds. Best known for \u201cThe Liars\u2019 Club<\/a><\/em>,\u201d \u201cCherry<\/a><\/em>\u201d and \u201cLit<\/a><\/em>,\u201d she is also a Pushcart Prize-winning poet and essayist. Karr\u2019s remarks focused on the place of memoir in nonfiction writing and the elusive hunt for the kind of truth that consists of more than getting the facts right. Here are excerpts from her talk:<\/em>

I actually pray about what to write, so if you think my success is unlikely, maybe you ought to pray. No, I’m kidding. Pray to me about what to write, and for the right amount of money, I\u2019ll tell you.

\"\"<\/a>I do actually pray \u2026 I pray, \u201cLet me write one true sentence,\u201d which is what Hemingway used to say. It\u2019s the application of your ass to the chair and then you just try to write one true sentence. What is a true sentence? We\u2019re talking about what lies between what is actual lived experience.

The experience on the page is not for you, the writer. This is a mistake people make about memoirs \u2013 that if you have had a bad enough ass-whipping, you should make a lot of money. Now, I think we should all make a lot of money, but that\u2019s a topic for another evening.

But in therapy, say, you pay them. In memoir, hopefully, they pay you. That suggests that you are supposed to give them something: an experience \u2013 that distilled experience. You\u2019re supposed to create a world where things that perhaps sound strange on Jerry Springer actually begin to sound feasible or possible.

You read the \u201cBlack Hawk Down<\/a>\u201d book, for instance. You suddenly almost believe that you understand what happened in Somalia. There\u2019s an immediacy to that kind of writing, and to any good writing, I think.

It\u2019s sort of suggested that memoirists have extremely venal motives. I don\u2019t write my memoirs for charity; I really do write to generate income. I\u2019m not Oprah, would that I were. But some people suspect us. I think of the William Gass<\/a> line: \u201cTo have written a memoir is already to have made yourself a monster.\u201d Clearly a guy whose novels didn\u2019t sell.

And Gass makes a good point. We\u2019ve all read these memoirs \u2014 we\u2019ve got the James Frey example<\/a>, right? He assumes that we\u2019re going to betray confidences, we\u2019re out to settle scores, we\u2019re going to display our wounds in the marketplace, we\u2019re going to try to evoke pity.

I was always horrified when I would hear myself described before I was being interviewed as this Dickensian orphan. People often say when they meet me, \u201cYou look better than I thought you should look.\u201d Calvin Trillin, the first time I met him, said the same thing to me, \u201cYou look a lot better than I thought.\u201d

I said, \u201cYou know, Mr. Trillin, due respect and all, nice to meet you. How bad am I \u2014 what am I supposed to look like?\u201d He said, \u201cMmm. Some bedraggled slattern.\u201d I was so tickled that I didn\u2019t look that way.

If you want to settle a score in a memoir, you live in the state of Texas. You can buy a firearm at the Target. I mean, really, there are better ways to settle a score\u2026

One of the ways I try to examine my own motives is to be fairly ruthless with myself when I ask about \u201cone true sentence.\u201d This recent book that I wrote, available for a mere pittance, took me seven years to write. It was supposed to take me three.

They gave me a lot of money for it \u2013 not enough. They become extremely interested when they\u2019ve given you a lot of money in receiving the actual book later. In this, I find they are bad sports. But they kept asking me \u2013 you know, I remember my agent on the phone saying \u201cI don\u2019t get it. The stuff happened. You know what happened. It\u2019s like five years later. You know, they\u2019re being very patient.\u201d

I broke, literally broke, the delete key on my keyboard in my office. My keyboard is still broken. I threw away 2,000 finished pages \u2026 not in one pile; I don\u2019t smoke pot or anything. But it was 130 pages here, 300 pages there, 120 pages here. I think that they didn\u2019t fully understand that it wasn\u2019t [that] events were changing. You don\u2019t have to change the events. Knowing the truth is not about manufacturing events. It\u2019s choosing what to write about, one, and then examining your motives.

Specifically, I didn\u2019t want to write about my son\u2019s father, my ex-husband. So my first go at this book, I was about 200 hundred pages in, and I would write up to that point, and then sort of try to pole vault: \u201cNine years later,\u201d and just kind of, \u201ccomma,\u201d to try get around this thing. And the temptation then, when I first wrote about it, was to make him in a way more saintly, and me more bedraggled and slatternly. And again, this isn\u2019t a James Frey thing where I said we were in prison and we weren\u2019t. It\u2019s not a Jayson Blair thing where you say you talk to people who don\u2019t exist. It\u2019s about motive.

I think one reason the people I\u2019ve written about often remain very friendly \u2013 I have one here tonight \u2013 and they don\u2019t seem to want to sue me or they\u2019re not mad at me, is that I really try very hard not to attribute motives to other people that I cannot guarantee, unless somebody has told me, \u201cThis is my motive.\u201d I really try often not even to speculate. So what was hardest for me in writing about my husband wasn\u2019t the terrible moments between us, which all of you know who have had terrible moments with anybody. You usually remember the most horrible thing they said, and in some ways it\u2019s always unfair, because it\u2019s always out of context. It\u2019s usually that they were richly provoked.

\"\"<\/a>I could have started the memoir, \u201cIt all started when he hit me back.\u201d But I think when people read the book, and I\u2019m thinking of running over my husband when he moves in the garbage cans, I don\u2019t think people assume that\u2019s an accurate assessment of who he is. I think it\u2019s pretty clear who the asshole is.

My friend Geoffrey Wolff \u2013\u00a0Toby Wolff<\/a>\u2019s older brother, who wrote a memoir when I was first in graduate school that I read called \u201cThe Duke of Deception<\/a>,\u201d about their con-man father, Papa Wolff \u2013\u00a0he was writing a biography of Melville at one point. And I mentioned to him in passing, \u201cWasn\u2019t Melville this real asshole?\u201d And he\u2019s like, \u201cNo, whatever gave you that idea?\u201d

And I remember some apocryphal story about Melville. \u201cIt was Christmas, and his daughter wanted these oranges, and he has this big bushel of oranges that he\u2019s locked in his study, and the daughter is crying, and they have no food.\u201d And he said, \u201cWell, he had scurvy.\u201d Suddenly, that one piece of information changes entirely your take on the story. It\u2019s not as if I was saying something about Melville that was untrue. So the least of my problems as a memoirist, as a writer, is getting my facts right. I try not to write anything not true.

One of the historians I most admire, the biographers I most admire, is Robert Caro<\/a>, and one of the changes in reading biography or history is that at the beginning of many histories or biographies they have these kinds of position statements. So Robert Caro starts out to write this biography of Lyndon Johnson, this guy who\u2019s been able to push through the first civil rights act that they\u2019ve gotten since the Civil War, and he decides that Johnson is actually one of the most despicable people he\u2019s ever read about, heard about, thought about, in his life. There\u2019s this beautifully written chapter very early in the book that explains what his investment in the material is, what his limitations are.

In some ways, I think that that idea of the truth being eroded started in the 19th century when people started reading the Bible as a novel not as wisdom or truth but as a novel featuring God as a kind of minor character. Jesus and the prophets had all the good roles. And early on, when the novel was being invented, this genre that\u2019s seen as highfaluting now used to be seen as trashy the way memoir is now seen. We\u2019re seen as those weirdo people, who are, I don\u2019t know, writing the Lord\u2019s Prayer on a grain of rice. There\u2019s something wrong with you if you\u2019ve written a memoir.

At first novels were seen as skeevy because they were just made up. The idea was that they weren\u2019t sermons or epistles, they didn\u2019t have moral underpinnings, they didn\u2019t have the discipline that an epic poem required. Also in the 19th century, there began to be a blur between genres. Poets like Baudelaire<\/a> were writing prose poetry, and later James Joyce<\/a> was writing a very poetic kind of prose, and that\u2019s led to the mockumentary and edutainment.

So in some ways I think \u2013 yes, I think with Richard Nixon \u2013 there<\/em>\u2019s a politician who may have lied \u2026 we began to get the idea that maybe these guys weren\u2019t always dealing straight. So that when Robert McNamara later was manufacturing body counts, we began to mistrust government records about what was happening in the Vietnam War.

When Michael Herr writes his book \u201cDispatches,\u201d which is arguably one of the great memoirs ever written, it\u2019s not that we assume his memory \u2013 by the way, if you\u2019ve never read \u201cDispatches,\u201d you\u2019d at least seen \u201cFull Metal Jacket.\u201d He wrote that, and he wrote the voiceover for \u201cApocalypse Now.\u201d So when you hear in \u201cApocalypse Now\u201d that weird kind of Rolling Stones music in the background with the voice of Charlie Sheen being really nutty, that\u2019s essentially the voice of \u201cDispatches<\/a>,\u201d which is, in this country, the voice of the Vietnam War. It made a noise. He\u2019s created an idiom that represents that war in this country and probably in other parts of the world.

So, it\u2019s not that we don\u2019t think that Herr has a corrupt memory or a corrupt imagination. But he writes a line like \u201cWe had this gook, and we were going to skin him\u201d as something he allegedly overheard, and then he later says, \u201cWhat can I say about these people? I stood as close to them as I could, because they were my guns. We covered each other. It was an exchange of services. But I also stood as far away as I could without leaving the planet.\u201d

So the complexity of his relationship with those events, his own emotional complexity, his difficulty, has become part of the narrative. Now, obviously that\u2019s not always necessary for a great journalist or a great historian. I think for a memoirist, it\u2019s probably always necessary.

[For more on Karr, check out Mayborn Conference director George Getschow\u2019s talk with her<\/a> or Chris Vognar\u2019s interview<\/a> over at The Dallas Morning News. For more on last weekend’s Mayborn Conference, see our post of narrative writing tips<\/a><\/em> from Tom Huang’s workshop at the conference, and take a peek at Larry McMurtry’s 32,000-volume private library<\/a><\/em>.]<\/em>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author Mary Karr showed up Friday in Grapevine, Texas, in the middle of a thunderstorm to talk about telling the truth. The first keynote speaker at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, Karr addressed an after-dinner crowd of hundreds. Best known for \u201cThe Liars\u2019 Club,\u201d \u201cCherry\u201d and \u201cLit,\u201d she is also a Pushcart Prize-winning poet and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3192,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[429,431],"topics":[],"authors":[24],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-narrative-news","tag-books","tag-memoir","authors-andrea-pitzer"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMary Karr on truth: "the least of my problems as a memoirist, as a writer, is getting my facts right" - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2010\/07\/28\/mary-karr-memoir-and-the-truth-mayborn-conference-2010\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mary Karr on truth: "the least of my problems as a memoirist, as a writer, is getting my facts right" - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Author Mary Karr showed up Friday in Grapevine, Texas, in the middle of a thunderstorm to talk about telling the truth. 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