Mary Karr

The Art of Memoir

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Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.
For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse.  (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black belt sinner,” providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre.
Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers’ experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr’s own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told— and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.
Joining such classics as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today’s most popular literary forms—a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft.
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222 printed pages
Publication year
2015
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
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Impressions

  • Edna Montesshared an impression4 years ago
    💡Learnt A Lot

Quotes

  • Mariana de los Santoshas quoted4 years ago
    Memory is a pinball in a machine—it messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of scenes, stories you’ve heard. Then the machine goes tilt and snaps off. 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?
  • Mariana de los Santoshas quoted4 years ago
    A good writer can conjure a landscape and its peoples to live inside you, and the best writers make you feel they’ve disclosed their soft underbellies. Seeing someone naked thrills us a little.
  • Mariana de los Santoshas quoted4 years ago
    At least one purpose of this book is to lay out some lucky gliding spaces for a wannabe memoirist, to help her discover The Story, the one only she can tell; then to help said person craft a voice exactly suited to telling that tale in the truest, most beautiful way. By true, I mean without trying to pawn off fabricated events. By beautiful, I mean for the reader.

    What’s the test of beauty? Rereading. A memoir you return
    to usually feels so intimate—believable, real—that you’re lured back time and again. You miss its geography and atmosphere. Its characters are like old pals you pine after.

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