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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.
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Mary Karr |
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d1a5f85
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One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit.
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Mary Karr |
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Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.
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memoir
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Mary Karr |
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bb023a1
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He was so proud that she had more going on north of her neck than her hairdo.
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Mary Karr |
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The first night he slept with her, he took a washrag and a jug of wood alcohol to get rid of her makeup, saying he wanted to know what he was getting into.
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Mary Karr |
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I couldn't have been more than six, but I was calling her an ignorant little bitch. Her momma stood on the porch step shaking her mop at me and saying there were snakes and lizards coming out of my mouth, to which I said i didn't give a shit.
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Mary Karr |
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508e4f9
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The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts.
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Mary Karr |
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7296e2d
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The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.
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Mary Karr |
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But the boys' bicycle pack also sent a stab of envy through me. If I couldn't yet capture John Cleary with my feminine wiles, then surely I deserved to enjoy the physical abandon he got, liberties I instinctively knew were vanishing. (I know, I know. Psychoanalytic theory would label this pecker envy and seek to smack me on the nose with it. To that I'd say, o please. Of actual johnsons I had little awareness. What I coveted was privilege.)
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Mary Karr |
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cd6f0af
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I exhale a highway of smoke and stare down it, then say, Each day has just been survival, just getting through, standing it. Don't you see how savage that sounds? Like, that's the way men in prison yards think. You live in a rich suburb and teach literature.
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Mary Karr |
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1422cd4
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every writer needs two selves--the generative self and the editor self.
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Mary Karr |
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If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.
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Mary Karr |
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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
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Mary Karr |
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28cd2fe
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In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it's done right.
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Mary Karr |
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Every day I feel more like some defeated matador limping out of the arena after I've been gored, or like some general coming back from a long battle.
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Mary Karr |
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Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self - delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.
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memoirs
memoir
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Mary Karr |
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c71f824
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Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope. Fake it till you make it.
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Mary Karr |
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2d6e66d
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After Mother got her picture, we all stood around the fire truck eating moon-shaped cookies dusted with powdered sugar that the mayor's wife had brought in some Tupperware. It was stuff like that that'd break your heart about Leechfield, what Daddy meant when he said the town was too ugly not to love.
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Mary Karr |
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Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?)
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Mary Karr |
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Before that summer, I had many times heard long-winded Baptist preachers take ten minutes to pray over card tables of potato salad and fried chicken at church picnics, but the way those sweating, red-faced men sat around on stacked pallets of lumber gulping oysters taught me most of what I knew about simple gladness.
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Mary Karr |
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22a3e69
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Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By "charm," I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You'll need both sides of yourself--the beautiful and the beastly--to hold a reader's attention."
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Mary Karr |
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e46c532
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But what if I don't believe in God? It's like they've sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can't will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this. Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shap..
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prayer
prayers
alcoholics-anonymous
atheist
desperation
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Mary Karr |
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a11e8e7
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Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.
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Mary Karr |
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The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.
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memoirs
memoir
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Mary Karr |
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948302d
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I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant. Touching that triangle of yellowed paper toda..
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Mary Karr |
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7e9e1ac
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It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy--getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff---get undercut by having to play football.
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Mary Karr |
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e035b08
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Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don't use foreign expressions. It's elitist.)
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Mary Karr |
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ed74111
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When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.
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Mary Karr |
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Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself, What haven't I said? How might someone else involved have seen it differently?
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Mary Karr |
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401a035
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Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I'm in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelbarrows of gold
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Mary Karr |
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b536124
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The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness.
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Mary Karr |
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cf765d2
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But most of the time, we keep memories packed away. I sometimes liken that moment of sudden unpacking to circus clowns pouring out of a miniature car trunk--how did so much fit into such a small space?
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Mary Karr |
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70f0a5e
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Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible.
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memoirs
memoir
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Mary Karr |
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a4f00c9
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I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me.
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Mary Karr |
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Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.
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spiritual
great-insight
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Mary Karr |
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a9f4ed3
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every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me--later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish.
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Mary Karr |
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acd1e3d
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The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body's tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.
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karr
the-liar-s-club
mary
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Mary Karr |
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994b0e2
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KIDS IN DISTRESSED FAMILIES ARE GREAT repositories of silence and carry in their bodies whole arctic wastelands of words not to be uttered, stories not to be told.
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Mary Karr |
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8e3aeb1
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I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.
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Mary Karr |
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a096d4b
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Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore
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Mary Karr |
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7f9f687
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Far as I can tell, a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
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Mary Karr |
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9fdbdf8
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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 makes us better readers of life. James Wood, How Fiction Works As
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Mary Karr |
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44ed458
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Now try writing some pages to serve as later notes. Because you're not yet sure of voice or anything else, you're free from the need to squash in all manner of background information, explaining what year it is, etc. That stuff will just get you back in your head and drive you nuts. You're free to write as if all that stuff is in the reader's head already. It will be, by the time you get to this part of the book. You
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Mary Karr |
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0aeeb8c
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What would you write if you weren't afraid?
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Mary Karr |