Karr's art of Memoir

I don’t try to reconstruct empty spots. I’ve been vigorously encouraged by various editors to fictionalize. They would say, It must have been a very dramatic scene, saying goodbye to your mother. And I remember reading that Vivian Gornick said to her students, “Just make it up and see if it’s true.” Bullshit. In fiction, you manufacture events to fit a concept or an idea. With memoir, you have the events and manufacture or hopefully deduce the concept. You don’t remember something? Write fiction.

It pissed me off when I saw James Frey on Larry King saying, You know, there’s a lot of argument about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. You know what? There isn’t. If it didn’t happen, it’s fiction. If it did happen, it’s nonfiction. If you see the memoir as constructing a false self to sell to some chump audience, then you’ll never know the truth, because the truth is derived from what actually happened. Using novelistic devices, like reconstructed dialogue or telescoping time, isn’t the same as ginning up fake episodes.

Today I just couldn't get going.  I was in a muddle about verb tenses: my book goes in and out of past and present, even inside a paragraph.  It felt lazy to me.  One model novel, Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene, is most mostly present, but has past in there.  But always in a discrete paragraph or fragment.

My friends David & Christine bumped into me in the Ballard library.  I confessed my struggle on tenses.  Since David had mentioned Karr and Liar's Club, I went to the shelves, picked up Lit, and skimmed a lot of tense changes by Karr.  Mostly past.  Like mine.  But present came flooding in for whole chapters.  So use the verb tense the story demands.

Autobiography is mostly contingent on voice. If the voice is strong enough, the reader will go anywhere with you. And who’s better at syntax and diction than a poet?

So back home, google, and this Paris Review interview of Karr in 2009.

 Prose always seems inadequate to me because every line isn’t a jewel. But it can’t be. Prose favors information; poetry favors music and form.

The memoir’s antagonist has to be some part of the self, and the self has to be different at the end of the book than it was at the beginning. Otherwise you have what I call the sound-bite memoir or the ass-whipping memoir. 

On Neiman Storyboard:

That suggests that you are supposed to give the [Reader] something: an experience – that distilled experience.

Interviewed by Dean Nelson in 2011, around minute 8:20, Karr says she doesn't write for herself--not "what is important to me."  My whole memoir is what is important to me.  Hmmm.  Should I say fuck it, shred the thing?

At minute 9:50, a memoirist has events, and you don't know the truth of those events, so you manufacture meaning from those events.

At minute 15, the truth has to ambush you.  Is this example, the events are Karr leaving for California.  Her own life narrative had been that her dad left her.  She had to scratch at the story, the events, to find the truth--that she left him not that he left her.  So how would that apply to my story?  What myth have I created, that through the writing of this memoir, I'll find the truth behind?  I really resist the pithy answers.  I don't trust "finding the truth."  I think it is just a new narrative--one that replaces another.  But as I do this rewrite, I am trying to open my mind.