God's Favorite Writer

On the highest shelves in Mary Karr’s New York City apartment, above the writer’s desk, is a collection of capital block letters that spell out “HUBRIS.” The letters are an unsubtle warning against the sin of excessive pride. It must work, because Karr is extremely, hilariously self-deprecating. So much so that in Lit [2], her latest memoir, she denigrates her own suicide attempt as “the lamest stab in suicide’s history.”

Lit is also about Karr’s alcoholism, her conversion to Catholicism, and her trip to the “mental Marriott”—her kicky euphemism for the psych ward. The book is written in the singularly gritty yet funny voice that is the hallmark of all Karr’s autobiographical work, including her two previous memoirs: The Liar’s Club [3], about her mother’s psychotic break during Karr’s childhood in East Texas, and Cherry [4], which picks up in her adolescence. She has also published several books of poetry. You can see the link between that genre and her nonfiction: She uses deeply lyrical language, particularly to describe her physical environment (“razor-slicing rain,” for instance, and “chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos”).

I talked to Karr over tea in her orchid-filled Hell’s Kitchen apartment about her new book, her faith, subway rage, how God likes her better than other authors, and why memoir writing is not stereotypically female.

Jessica Grose: I was really taken by the prologue of Lit, in which you are talking about how important it is for your son, Dev, to tell his own story. Did you consciously wait until he was an adult to write about him?

Mary Karr: I think I unconsciously waited. I was offered a lot of money to write this book in 2000, when Cherry came out and the reviews were good. I was offered a lot a lot from three different publishers. And I turned it down. That was one of those crazy prayer decisions. In truth, when I look back on it, I really did not want to be talking about my alcoholism and our divorce probably until Dev was out of high school.

My son has never read my books, but he knows what’s in all of them, and I think he’ll read them eventually.

I read Lit at the end of August, when there were two articles in the New York Times Arts section, one of which was about a British woman, Julie Myerson, who wrote about her son’s drug addiction and was roundly pilloried [5]. The other was a companion article about Kaylie Jones [6], who wrote a memoir called Lies My Mother Never Told Me [7] about her narcissistic mom. There was this discussion in the air about whether it’s OK to write about young children.

Anybody else can write about anything they want, God bless. I really don’t have an opinion on that. But in every book I’ve written, I’ve asked everybody in advance and told them things that might make them uncomfortable. I told my mother, “I’m going to write about when you tried to stab us with a butcher knife,” and she said, “Oh, go ahead!” And with my son, I said, “I’m going to write about checking into the Mental Marriott, and is that going to be hard for you? And I’m going to write about when you were little, and what kind of kid you were, and [the book’s] going to have these sorts of episodes in it. I’m going to write about your dad and me fighting.” He was like, “I know all that.” I just didn’t want him to hear it from somebody else. I have no vested interest in him reading [Lit]. But we’re pretty close; we’re a pretty open family. So I ask everybody in advance and everybody always says yes. I’m not much of a score-settler.

You wrote for Slate about memoir a few years ago [8], and the last line really stuck with me: “If someone's behaving like an asshole in my book, it most always tends to be me.”

The reader can’t know something about your psychology that you don’t admit. If you don’t own up to something, you’re not their guide anymore. They’re looking at you out of estrangement. In my books, I try to create an intimacy and a confidence in the reader that I’m going to—as much as possible, given that my memory is corrupt and I am how I am—that I am going to try to render things as closely as I can to my experience. As many people would say: I was in a mental institution, how valid [are my memories]?

After I read Lit, I went back and reread Cherry and The Liar’s Club. I noticed that toward the end of The Liar’s Club, you briefly mention your step-siblings’ reunion with your mom. But you say that’s their story, and so don’t fill in the details. How do you determine when it’s your story or someone else’s?

If I am intimate enough with that person, I feel that I can fairly represent them. It’s one reason I chose a fake name for my town, because the people who were secondary characters, the principal of the school, and the mayor of my little town and stuff like that; I don’t really know those people. They flitted through my life when I was a child, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing something in-depth using their names. I really have no right to write about anybody, except for myself, but it’s impossible to write about me without writing about other people. It’s a matter of how well I know them, if they’re three-dimensionally known to me. I’ve never had anybody say no when I asked to write about them, interestingly enough.

I’ve read a lot of interviews recently [9] with young female memoirists who say things like, “I’m writing this memoir to help other people,” and I always find that to be disingenuous. And I wonder if you had any insight into why female memoirists, specifically, have this need to claim altruism, why they feel that something being a good story isn’t enough of a reason to tell it.

You know, I think it actually has to do with what it means to be feminine in this culture. If you betray a family confidence, it’s not seen as appropriately feminine. It’s one reason, maybe, that men’s memoirs, especially about adolescence, are so much easier to write. Because for a man to say, “And then I pushed my father down on the ground and stormed out of the house and stole the car,” is, in a way, what a man does to come of age. For a woman to betray family secrets or intimacies is seen as particularly grotesque or masculinizing.

I didn’t [write] it to help anybody. I did it for the money. I did it because I’m greedy and I like living in New York.

Do you do it for enjoyment?

I don’t. I don’t enjoy writing. I used to have taped over my desk over there the Beckett quote, “Fail better.” So I have a sense of it always being, kind of, pushing the rock up the hill: “Is this any good?” and “No, it’s probably not.”

I wonder if finding your faith helped your writing. You say in Lit, when you’re cautiously becoming Catholic, “It isn’t the ritual of the high Mass that impresses me. But the people—their collective surrender. If I can’t do reverence to that, how dead are my innards?” Does that acceptance of surrender help with your confidence? Your voice is so self-critical. You don’t even give yourself credit for a good suicide attempt. You were like, lamest suicide attempt ever!

Well, the shrinks make a big deal out of it—it was a suicidal gesture, that’s what they call it. I didn’t actually put my hands on myself, so I’m a fuck-up. We know that. But yes, [my faith is] unbelievably helpful. And maybe it’s no different than people doing the Power of Now or whatever. I think the Holy Spirit takes a lot of forms.

I really do write based on prayer. You could see that as talking to your most sane self or your sober self. Somebody said to me, “So, you think you’ve had all this success because God likes you better than other writers?” And I said, “Absolutely!” Because of my faith, I do have a sense that I’m supposed to be alive on the planet. Which, given the way I was brought up, I didn’t exactly have going in.

Does that make sense? Talking about spiritual matters to a secular audience is like doing card tricks on the radio. It’s like, “This is really cool, everybody,” and they’re like, “Yeah, OK!” So I know that it sounds a little nutty.

I don’t it sounds that nutty, and I’m definitely part of the secular audience. I read you and Anne Lamott, and you’re both people who never thought they would be spiritual but have become spiritual, and the way you write about spirituality is very comforting. It is self-acceptance, ultimately, so I think done well enough it can be relatable.

It’s really just about not wanting to kill people on the subway. It’s also about not wanting to kill myself when I get home for wanting to kill people on the subway.

I talk about the difference between happiness and joy. I can honestly say I was depressed for so much of my life that I think I knew how to be excited or enthusiastic, but I certainly didn’t know anything about joy. Just that simple [feeling], when you run into the ocean.

The way you wrote about your friendship with Meredith, your best friend from high school, in Cherry, was such an honest portrayal of female friendship. That’s something that people rarely get right—it’s either utterly saccharine or completely catty. Why do you think that’s difficult to do honestly?

It’s hard to write about anything really intimate. It’s hard to write about sex and it’s hard to write about laughing. To meet someone who read books, who was my age, was just the greatest gift. I just can’t imagine what my teen years would have been like without it.

Are you still actively teaching students?

Oh, yeah.

What sort of advice do you give them, or have you ever counseled them to not write about something?

I usually tell them that I don’t know what they’re supposed to do. I say that I think most writers have a failure of character, a failure to accept what’s being assigned to you to write. And that often what we’re most talented at we resist, because we think it’s silly, or small, or not good enough. I teach with George Saunders, a brilliant fiction writer, and he’s so funny. He went to Syracuse when Ray Carver and Toby Wolff were there, and he kept trying to write these gritty, minimalist, realistic stories, and then he’d have some bizarre thing in the middle of it, and Ray and Toby would kill themselves, and tell him, “Just do more of this! Just do this all the time!” And he’d be like, “I want to be a man!”

We often have a way that we think we’re going to correct ourselves in the work that leads us to deny the talent we’re assigned or the subjects we’re assigned or the style we’re assigned. That’s certainly been true for me and I often see it with young writers.

Other writers have written about the subjects of Cherry (adolescence) and Lit (recovery). Are there any books about overcoming addictions that you really like?

I don’t feel like people have done a good job writing about recovery. I think a lot of times it’s been too two-dimensional. You go from rehab to zippety-do-da. Or they sort of fuss a little bit and then everything’s roses. Or they try to glamorize their drinking and drug abuse as being extraordinarily grotesque. They think the best memoir will be the one in which the weirdest shit happens. That’s not true. I think it’s the one where the reader can fully enter the experience, and if that means that the experience is grotesque—and in my book, in many places it is grotesque—you have to normalize that. Not make it super weird, so that the reader can enter into it without thinking it’s too cartoony. I think there are people who write what I call sound-byte memoirs, which can be summed up in a sentence. This is all about, insert here, “I was a teenage sex slave,” or “My mother hit me with a brick every day of my life,” or whatever.

In Survival in Auschwitz [10], what’s hardest for Primo Levi is that he lets his father starve to death to get him an extra piece of potato and an extra cup of peas at the end of the day. They sort of make this unspoken collusion, that he’s going to make it, and the old man isn’t.

But he [also] shows the hope that, “Maybe I’ll get on this good work detail; it’s lucky that I’m on this detail.” It’s really about the ways that we find to hope. And a lot of these [other] memoirs, they’re just trying to come up with the most horrible stuff. And, in fact, what you should be thinking of is, how did I get out of here? What kept me going?