Brutally Honest Carnality
No sugarcoating. No beating around the bush. In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr cuts straight to the bone. Drawing directly from each memoir she’s encountered, she distills the lessons she’s learned about what makes or breaks a memoir. Lessons like how authors navigate family when writing it, articulating your voice effectively, and choosing the fine details are all covered.
In this review, I’ll share my favorite quote, break down her style, reflect on the book’s impact, and wrap up with my final rating.
Favorite Quote
Of the many quotes I enjoyed (see my notes at the end), this one stood out most:
“In memoir the heart is the brain.” – pg. 151
It appears in the latter half of the book in Chapter 17: Blind Spots and False Selves. Throughout the book, Karr reinforces a lot about diving into the truth and developing your voice as you’re experiencing it. The phrase captures the essence of memoir: leading with the heart while shaping it with the mind. I particularly enjoyed it because it neatly summarizes the book’s core message.
Writing Style
Karr is straight and to the point. Some chapters are only a couple of pages, whereas others take about 10-20 pages to get through. It’s overall a quick read where she doesn’t add more than necessary. Everything has its place. I like this because it delivers right away what you’re looking for in the majority of chapters. A few longer chapters lost me midway, though they may benefit slower readers. Nonetheless, for a 218-page book, it wraps everything up well.
Impact
The vulnerability and openness of Karr led me down a path of my own reflection. Seeing the way she talks about her book, Lit, details on writing some parts about the divorce and marriage made it clear that (1) writing is painful and (2) the deeper meaning to things comes after pulling back the layers frequently.
It provides a sense of relatability and understanding that this writing journey is not an easy feat for anyone. It made me realize that in my own writing, the hardest parts to put down are often where the deepest meaning lies.
I write more about this in my Substack in posts like Where the Words Lead, Why We Write, and Embracing Your Writing Voice.
Rating
Each rated 0 = sucks, 0.5 = okay, 1 = fascinating:
Entertainment = 0.5
Insights = 1
Storytelling = 1
Relevance = 1
Clarity = 1
Overall = 4.5
Overall, not the most entertaining book, but everything else was very much up there. Entertainment was lacking because I wasn’t fully pulled in with some memoir references. On the other hand, the clarity provided a huge boost to the other categories as it didn’t drag on too long anywhere, nor were there that many missed marks on showing & explaining concepts.
If you’d like to dive into The Art of Memoir yourself, here’s the link to grab a copy here (Amazon affiliate link).
Book Quotes
1) The Past’s Vigor
“‘We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.’ – Louise Gluck, ‘Nostos’” – pg. 1
“So a single image can split open the hard seed of the past, and soon memory pours forth from every direction, sprouting its vines and flowers up around you till the old garden’s taken shape in all its fragrant glory.” – pg. 2
“What the group deems right almost always obliterates anybody’s original recollections (except for those rare memory aces, who somehow cleave their original intake). It’s the power of groupthink, the basis of both family dynamics and most popaganda.” – pg. 4
“Neurologist Jonathan Mink, MD, explained to me that with such intense memories as David’s, we often record the emotion all alone, all detailed blurred into unreadable smear.” – pg. 6
2) The Truth Contract Twixt Writer and Reader
“‘The whole journey is toward the truth, or toward authenticity, agency, and freedom. How could it possibly help to plant a lie in the middle of it?’ Edward St. Aubyn” – pg. 9
“Truth may have become a foggy, fuzzy nether area. But untruth is simple: making up events with the intention to deceive.” – pg. 11
“Common memory rifts involve either (1) unknowable interpretation–someone’s inner intent or motives; or (2) chronology–dates or how long something went on or how often; and/or (3) disagreements about place – where something went down.” – pg. 15
“That’s partly why memoir is in its ascendancy–not because it’s not corrupt, but because the best ones openly confess the nature of their corruption.” – pg. 16
“Anything worth doing is worth over-doing.” – pg. 21
“A good lie well told and stuck to is often better than the truth.” – pg. 21
“A writer whose point of view was closer inside the past might only concentrate on feeling wounded by the insult without tacking on that fact, because it could jar the reader from the instant.” – pg. 24
3) Why Not to Write a Memoir: Plus a Pop Quiz to Protect the Bleeding & Box Out the Rigid
“‘If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.’ Zora Neale Hurston” – pg. 27
“Distance frees us of our former ego’s vanities and lets us see deeper into events.” – pg. 27
“If you can’t rewrite, give it up. You need to be able to rethink and correct th easy interpretation.” – pg. 29
“I want you to suffer through sitting in a room for some hours with your worst memories.” – pg. 30
“To tap in to your deepest talent, you need to seek out a calm, restful state of mind where your head isn’t defending your delicate ego and your heart can bloom open a little.” – pg. 31
“Sit a minute and let all this wash past. You should feel like you’ve been somewhere.” – pg. 32
“What would you write if you weren’t afraid?” – pg. 34
4) A Voice Conjures the Human Who Utters It
“‘I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has changed and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of [man’s] puny inexahusitble voice, still talking.’ – William Faulkner” – pg. 35
“”And the more memorable the voice, the truer a book sounds because you never lose sight of the narrator cobbling together his truth — not everybody’s agreed on version. Or is it the truer a book, the better the voice?” – pg. 41
“All drama depends on our need to connect with one another. And we’re all doomed to drama; even the most privileged among us suffer the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.” – pg. 44
“Again: voice grows from the nature of a writer’s talent, which stems from innate character.” – pg. 47
“The trick to fashioning a deeper, truer voice involves understanding how you might misperceive as you go along; thus looking at things more than one way. The goal of a voice is to speak not with objective authority but with subjective curiosity.” – pg. 49
“If you trust the truth enough to keep unveiling yourself on the page – no matter how shameful those revelations may at first seem – the book will naturally structure itself to maxmimize what you’re best at. You’re best at it because it sits at the core of your passions.” – pg. 51
“Developing a voice is actually learning how to lodge your own memories inside someone else’s head.” – pg. 51
5) Don’t Try This at Home: The Seductive, Narcissistic Count
“‘...I mean what would you do if you had to create Beauty? I’m afraid I’d start screaming, the most irksome forms of insects coming from my mouth. I’m afraid I’d come up with death.’ – Dean Young, ‘One Story’” – pg. 55
6) Sacred Carnality
“‘My holy of holies is the human body.’ – Anton Chekhov, May 1888” – pg. 71
“Getting sophisticated about carnal writing means selecting sensual data – items, odors, sounds – to recount details based particular in a way that argues for its truth.” – pg. 72
“An excellent carnal writer fashions not a robot, but what feels like a breathing, tasting avatar and the reader can climb inside, thus wearing the writer’s hands and standing inside her shoes. The reader gets zipped into your skin.” – pg. 78
7) How to Choose Detail
“‘Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn make us better readers for life.’ – James Wood, How Fiction Works” – pg. 79
“These concrete images made me trust my memory of the whole scene as mine, not just something I heard about. And the carnality of the burned tongue is something anybody who’s ever sipped scaling coffee can practically feel. There’s an intimate ‘truth’ that helps the reader enter the scene–small and particular.” – pg. 80
8) Hucksters, the Deluded, and Big Fat Liars
“‘I saw prophets tearing their false beards, I saw frauds joining sects of flagellants, executioners in sheep’s clothing, who fled the people’s wrath, playing shepherd’s pipes,’ – Zbigniew Herbert, ‘What I Saw’” – pg. 81
“What I’, guessing: many just shrugged past it, because we’ve all chosen to accept that the line between fiction and nonfiction is too subtle for us to discern.” – pg. 86
“The line between memory and fact is blurry, between interpretation and fact.” – pg. 87
“Whoever believes the least wins, because he’ll never be found wrong.” – pg. 89
9) Interiority and Inner Enemy – Private Agonies Reade Deeper Than External Whammies
“‘It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruins and confusing changes. But I find it necessary to use the utmost caution about my eyesight.’ — George Elliot, Middlemarch.” – pg. 91
“The split self or inner conflict must manifest on the first pages and form the book’s thrust or through line–some journey toward the self’s overhaul by book’s end.” – pg. 92
“The memories I’ve gnawed on and rehearsed are the ones most key to what’s eating me up, and only those can help me to find a book’s shape.” – pg. 98
“In almost every literary memoir I know, it’s the internal struggle providing the engine for the tale.” – pg. 100
10) On Finding the Nature of Your Talent
“‘Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses respect for himself. And having no respect, he ceases to love.’ – Fyodor Dostoevsky” – pg. 101
“In short: How are you trying to appear? The author of a lasting memoir manages to power past the initial defenses, digging past the false self to where the truer one waits to tell the complicated story.” – pg. 102
11) The Visionary Maxine Hong Kingston
“Tan recently noted vis-a-vis Chin’s attacks that ‘Being marginalized by the reading public was adjudged authentic by him, whereas being read by the mainstream invariably meant you’d sold out.” – pg. 110
“Amy Tan put it this way: ‘Sure, you can establish tidy moral or political standards for how race is represented on the page: it’s caled propaganda.’ Propaganda seeks to destroy art in order to sanitize culture.” – pg. 110
12) Dealing with Beloveds (On & Off the Page)
“‘Families exist to witness each other’s disappointments.’ Laura Sillerman” – pg. 111
“On one end sit memoirists–mostly women–who interview and almost collaborate. Carolyn See rewrote her Dreaming in response to family comment. On the other sit those with enough moxie not to give a rat’s ass–all men, in my experience.” – pg. 11
“If you had to live it, you get to write it.” – pg. 111
“(1) Notify subjects way in advance, detailing parts that might make them wince…
(6) … Give information in the form you received it.
(11) Let reader know how subjective your point of view is. This is in some way a form of respect to your subjects, who might disagree.” – pg. 121
11 points summarized at the end for how to approach this situation. All good points summarized. 1, 6, and 11 spoke most! Showcased her experience with family. Spectrum is wide for how people approach it. My own take is to view it with respect!
13) On Information, Facts & Data
“‘The most interesting information comes from children for they tell all they know and then stop.’ – Mark Twain” – pg. 123
“Informational writing tells, it doesn’t show. Some writers make such great sentences that they fascinate even while dispensing facts. But mostly information is the good writer’s nemesis. It yanks the reader out of scenes, away from drama and lived experience, where the reader can watch external events and interpret them on his own.” – pg. 123
“What makes Orwell a genius is trusting that this small, strange moment that touched him so deeply could also touch a reader if he told it frankly enough.” – pg. 127
“In any good memoir, the writer tries to meet the reader to where she is by offering information in the way it’s felt—to reflect the writer’s inner values and cares either in clever linguistic form … or dramatic scene … .” – pg. 127
14) Personal Run-Ins with Fake Voices
“‘The difference between mad people and sane people,’ Brave Orchid explained to the childre, ‘is that sane people have variety when they talk story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.” – Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior – pg. 129
“They’re poets known for experimental bents and hermetic symbolic systems that can forge intense psychological spaces in a reader’s head.” – pg. 131
“I spent nine hard, exasperating concentrated months on the first chapters of Liars’ Club alone, which was essentially developing that voice—a watchmaker’s minuscule efforts noodling with syntax and diction.” – pg. 144
“The voice had to be consistent to sound true. Tone would vary, but diction and syntax had to match up.” – pg. 144
15) On Book Structure and the Order of Information
“Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to create a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.” – St. Augustine, City of God – pg. 147
“Imagine sitting down to tell it to a pal at lunch.” – pg. 148
16) The Road to Hell is Paved with Exaggeration
“‘Don’t brandish your stumps over other people’s heads don’t knock your white cane on the panes of the well-fed,’ – Zhignlew Herbert, ‘Mr. Cogito Reflects on Suffering’” – pg. 149
“The worst events or the most spectacular wins don’t make the best books. Maybe the most truly felt event does – or some cunning mix of voice and story shaped by passion.” – pg. 149
“what you felt deeply warrants your emotional response, try to honor your past by writing it that way.” – pg. 150
17) Blind Spots and False Selves
“‘We apply certain kinds of pressure to you, under which you are forced to flee to your highest ground … But hopefully, under that pressure, you leave behind all the false You’s — the imitative You, the too-clever You, the Avoiding You – and settle into that (sometimes, at first, disappointing) beast, Real You … Real You is all you have and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality.’ George Saunders, MFA graduation speech, Syracuse University, 2013” – pg. 151
“In memoir the heart is the brain.” – pg. 151
18) Truth Hunger: The Public and Private Burning of Kathryn Harrison
“‘Lying is done with words, but also with silence.’ Adrienne Rich, ‘Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.” – pg. 163
“Your psychological proclivity determines which better fits your story. That decision grows from the nature of your character. Autonomy in such choices is a fairy tale.” – pg. 167
“Harrison may have written to reclaim her own future, but by breaking the silence about incest, she no doubt rescued countless others. Rather than vilify her, critics should’ve given her a medal for public service.” – pg. 170
19) Old-School Technologies for the Stalled Novice
“‘Yes, I felt very small. THe typewriter seemed larger than a piano, I was less than a molecule. What could I do? I drank more.’ Albert Sanchez Pinol, Pandora in the Congo” – pg. 171
20) Major Reveals in Cherry and Lit
“‘The idea that the looker affects the sight is taken for granted in every field of scientific enquiry today, but one needs to be clear about what it does (and does not) mean. It does not mean ‘everything is subjective anyway,’ so that no clear and truthful statements can be made.’ – Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New.” – pg. 173
“Male adolescence is mondo celebrated in our culture – all ofr ock and roll exists to cheer on guys grabbing their crotches and humping mikes as preamble to reproducing the species. And men have all these great childish words – chubbie and woodie – that permit them to sound full of desire yet oddly innocent. There’s no comparable language for girls. Applied to a prepubescent girl, the standard nomenclature just sounds violently wrong.” – pg. 178
“The memory brought a stab of pain almost physical – I’d avoided writing about how in love we were, brimming with hope. It had been far easier to make glib, jokey remarks about how shitty a wife I’d been.” – pg. 180
“Ask yourself if you aren’t strapping your current self across the past to hide the real story.” – pg. 180
21) Why Memoirs Fail
“My last memory is the Headmast’er’s parting shot: ‘Well, good-bye, Graves, and remember that your bestfriend is the waste-paper basket.’ This has provided good advice … few writers seem to send their work through as many drafts as I do.’ – Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That” – pg. 181
“Another way a crap memoir fails is if the narrator fails to change over time. Characters who don’t transform or who lack depth become predictable.” – pg. 182
“Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me.” – pg. 184
“The Monopoly icon image says I am using imagined scenes from my adult point of view. Saying ‘I told Mother something like’ proves I’m reconcocting talk, not working from a diary or objective script.” – pg. 187
22) An Incomplete Checklist to Stave Off Dread
“‘Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a windowpane. Cut every page you write by at least a third. Stop constructing those piffing little similies of yours. Work out what you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don’t think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage! But do I take my own advice? Not a bit. Persiflage is my nom de guerre (Don’t use foreign expressions. It’s elitist.)’ – Hilary Mantel, Giving up the Ghost.” – pg. 189
“Show not so much how you suffer in long passages but how you survive. Use humor or an interjecting adult voice to help a reader over the dark places.” – pg. 191
23) Michael Herr: Start in Kansas, End in Oz
“‘Oh, return to zero, the master said. Use what’s lying around the house. Make it simple and sad.’ – Stephen Dunn, ‘Visiting the Master’” – pg. 193
“Herr recently told me by phone that before Vietnam he hadn’t known we’re not just responsible for all we do, but for all we see, too.” – pg. 201
24) Against Vanity: In Praise of Revision
“‘The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.’ – Mark Twain” – pg. 211
“(1) Writing is painful – it’s ‘fun’ only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standard of quality.” – pg. 211
“Writing, regardless of the end result–whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed–means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world. And you do that by fighting for elegance and beauty, redoing or cutting the flabby or disordered parts.” – pg. 215
“None of us can never know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.” – pg. 218
