The Art of Memoir

I once knew someone who ran a marathon without telling anyone. She trained for months – nursing knee injuries, chugging nasty energy gel packets, and sacrificing weekend afternoons to complete long runs – but only after she crossed the finish line did she share her huge achievement. Seems crazy, right?

Yet, I totally get it. I’m the same way with writing. It takes a certain kind of courage – or maybe it’s blind bravado – to own up to your ambition in any arena. Indicating intent – whether to run a race or write a book someday – makes it difficult to back down without losing face.

So it’s with some trepidation that I admit this: for all my adult life, I’ve aspired to write. Not work writing. Not blog writing. But book writing. I’ve taken classes to spur me on – a summer session taught by Tim O’Brien at Humber School for Writers and several courses through the University of Toronto. I’ve joined writers’ groups. I’ve taken Catapult classes. I’ve signed up for several Novella salons. I’ve purchased writing software to help me organize my thoughts. I’m even currently flirting with the idea of registering for a mother’s writing group or a Sackett Street Writers workshop.  

But my follow-through sucks. I left the feedback I got at Humber unaddressed. I dropped out of every writing group I joined. I chafed at the generic and clichéd advice dispensed in my Catapult class and wrote an uncharacteristically nasty review. The result? I’ve been working on the same story for years, and for years I’ve been getting in my own way.

But all the memoir-bingeing I’ve been doing lately has left me newly motivated to begin again. If Glynnis MacNicol can whip her single lady life into something wonderful and Porochista Khakpour can mine her own misery for copy (I’m under no illusions that I could do what Tara Westover did), then surely I stand a chance if I just give writing another shot? Or so my possibly delusional post-partum “if you can raise this kid you can do anything” reasoning goes.

In the throes of one such pep talk, I put down a book full of advice for working mothers and picked up a book full of advice for working writers – Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir. I’m a big fan of Karr – or at least a big fan of The Liar’s Club – and I was drawn to her description of The Art of Memoir as being “mainly for that person with an inner life big as Lake Superior.” “That’s me!” I thrilled, along with every other introvert ever.

When I used to work at Ogilvy at the beginning of my advertising career, a quote was painted on the wall behind my cubicle: “We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles. A blind pig can sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they grow in oak forests.” The Art of Memoir is basically the memoir-writing equivalent of that hint about oak forests. It’s packed with tips, tricks, and examples designed to give you a leg up in your literary pursuits. Here are three lessons I learned along the way:

Own up to your own flaws:

Karr writes at length about the importance of self-awareness and of resisting the universal urge to delude ourselves. “We want to be who we’re not,” she asserts. “The badass wants to be a saint, the saint a slut, the slut an intellectual in pince-nez glasses.” Karr encourages would-be writers to set aside who they wish to be and instead grapple with who they truly are:

“Without a writer’s dark side on view - the pettiness and vanity and schemes - pages give off the whiff of bullshit. People may like you because you’re warm, but you can also be quick to anger or too intense. Your gift for charm and confidence hides a gift for scheming and deceit. You’re withdrawn and deep but also slightly scornful of others. A memoirist must cop to it all, which means routing out the natural ways you try to masquerade as somebody else - nicer, smarter, faster, funnier.”

Karr’s description of her younger self makes it clear that she takes her own advice when it comes to taking the piss:

“I’d spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother’s front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for somebody to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I’d married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature.”

Someone else Karr credits for doing honesty well is Tobias Wolff, who wrote of himself in This Boy’s Life:

“I was a liar. Even though I lived in a place where everyone knew who I was, I couldn’t help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interests changed, and as other versions of myself failed to persuade. I was also a thief.”

Ensure your writing is evocative:

Karr pulls this beautiful quote from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory to illustrate the power of highly specific descriptions of places, people, and feelings:

“I see my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses on the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the mirror above the leather couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth, pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness: a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”

(The last line of the paragraph just kills me. Seems so innocent, but reads so ominously.)

Another example is Karr’s summation of her sister, Lecia: “I was left, she was hard right. I was a boho loner, she a southern business owner with a Christmas card list in the high hundreds.” The Christmas-card list bit is so good – one carefully chosen detail that tells you everything you need to know.

Be concise:

Here Karr passes on wisdom from Hilary Mantel:

“Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can.”

Well said, Hilary. Moving on.

But perhaps what I loved most about The Art of Memoir is how it brims with affection for Karr’s fellow writers.  “We are the inward looking goofballs,” she writes, “Who spill on our blouses and look befuddled in our selfies.” It’s a testament to Karr’s warmth that even that disparaging description sounds enticing. Oh to be a writer someday, even a befuddled-looking one.