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f992f15
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I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while.
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job
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Mary Karr |
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6debb68
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I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.
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fear
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Mary Karr |
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3dded63
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Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being.
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Mary Karr |
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1499610
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I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I'd make a brooch out of it.
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Mary Karr |
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6cdc1e0
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If you'd told me even a year before...that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin. I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director...a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles.
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spiritual-growth
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Mary Karr |
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b3b3ba5
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The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.
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Mary Karr |
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9e2cc62
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Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you're shaping the past's meaning.
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Mary Karr |
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2d6d0d6
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The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain
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Mary Karr |
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1c08665
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If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you.
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Mary Karr |
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33dca45
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Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved." p. xx"
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Mary Karr |
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af69b1f
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our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit
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Mary Karr |
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3dac064
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You think you know the story so well. It's a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I've ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it's like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside.
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Mary Karr |
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ddf4598
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As novelist Harry Crews once wrote, I'm the kind of person who--if he can't have too much of something--doesn't want any of it. In
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Mary Karr |
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fc93601
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If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it. Zora Neale Hurston
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Mary Karr |
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baad39f
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A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. --Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
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Mary Karr |
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320cc43
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Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it.
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Mary Karr |
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b719dd8
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I spent nine hard, exasperating, concentrated months on the first chapter of Liars' Club alone, which was essentially time developing that voice--a watchmaker's minuscule efforts, noodling with syntax and diction. Were I to add on the time I spent trying to recount that book's events in poetry and a novel, I could argue that concocting that mode of speech actually occupied some thirteen years (seventeen, if you count the requisite years in ..
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Mary Karr |
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a85cbab
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I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.
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Mary Karr |
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edfa3b3
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But whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: it may continue to tug on you without your being aware of it. And lying about it can--for all but the most hardened sociopath--carve a lonely gap between your disguise and who you really are. The practiced liar also projects her own manipulative, double-dealing facade onto everyone she meets, which makes moving through the world a wary, anx..
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Mary Karr |
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727eb77
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The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.
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Mary Karr |
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712116d
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During my short college stint, 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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ceda55e
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Unless you're like my friend, poet Brooks Haxton (who translates Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, and German), throwing in three-dollar words will just make you look like a dick.
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Mary Karr |
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639670f
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His silence hadn't been helplessness--it hadn't even been love. It had been pity.
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Mary Karr |
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7ecf810
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You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history
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Mary Karr |
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8f90806
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I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest.
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Mary Karr |
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a3cdfd2
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To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it.
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Mary Karr |
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6257f48
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Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you're born to, which opposes what little I've garnered about comportment. I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they'll try--without let up--to break you.
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Mary Karr |
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acad1f3
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It takes an obsessive streak that borders on lunacy to go rummaging around in the past as memoirists are wont to do, particularly a fragmented or incendiary past, in which facts are sparse and stories don't match up. I don't know if memoirists as children are lied to more often as kids or only grow up to resent it more, but it does seem we often come from the ranks of orphans or half-orphans-through-divorce, trying to heal schisms inside ou..
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Mary Karr |
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042391d
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When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my ..
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Mary Karr |
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e6f8d11
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It's hard to be an articulate ghost.
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memoirs
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Mary Karr |
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5b918c6
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Together we read Keats's letters to his lost beloved about how the stitches on a cap she made him went through him like a spear. I lace my fingers with his. The average non-poetry devotee may think the intensity around this stuff off-kilter at the least, but for us, it's like digging our hands together into a secret vat of pearls. In that realm only we are rich as any royalty.
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Mary Karr |
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8843560
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Maybe it fostered in me a creeping ambition-deficit disorder, but it could ease an ache. So anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which
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Mary Karr |
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607cb62
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Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings--sorrow, fury, joy--I had their junior counterparts--anxiety, irritation, excitement. But
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Mary Karr |
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8d6e558
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Height - ours and our boyfriends - is a running contest between Lecia and me. If I tell her good news about myself, she's liable to say 'I'm five-nine' and hang up.
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Mary Karr |
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73f0af3
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But because of you, I couldn't die and couldn't monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue--not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall. Blameless
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Mary Karr |
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4ae3a3a
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Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it.
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Mary Karr |
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aacde69
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Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, "I really want to have sex, where do I start?" What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another."
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Mary Karr |
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33be934
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The week the local paper carried a story about the boy's incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid's daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers.
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Mary Karr |
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62ff8eb
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We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. Louise Gluck, "Nostos"
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Mary Karr |
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a359a7a
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The creature you find in Speak, Memory is rare enough to be zoo-worthy. He's not just smarter but somehow more effete than most of us without seeming put on. Resenting him for it would be like resenting a gazelle for her grace. He doesn't sound prissy painting himself as a cultivated synesthete who can hear colors and see music, nor vain talking as a polyglot who translates his own work back and forth into many languages. He's just your sta..
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Mary Karr |
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d2c6e1e
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I've said it's hard. Here's how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory's waters drowns a little. Between chapters of Stop-Time, Frank Conroy stayed drunk for weeks. Two hours after Carolyn See finished her first draft of Dreaming, she collapsed with viral meningitis, which gave her double vision: "It was my brain's way of saying, 'You've been looking where you shouldn't be looking.'" Martin Amis reported a suffocating ener..
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Mary Karr |
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88da0b3
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They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According
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Mary Karr |
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6547782
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sentimentality is only emotion you haven't proven to the reader--emotion without vivid evidence.
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Mary Karr |
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a003f19
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Why is it that everybody else is traffic?
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Mary Karr |