The Art of Memoir n° 1, MARY KARR, Interviewed by Amanda Fortini

Mary Karr

The Art of Memoir n° 1, MARY KARR,

Interviewed by Amanda Fortini

The Paris Review,

Issue 191, Winter 2009

INTERVIEWER

In the first section of The Liars’ Club, you inhabit the mind of a seven-year-old to an uncanny degree. How were you able to capture what it was like to be a child?

KARR

Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down. One of my favorite poems, by Nicanor Parra, is called “Memories of Youth”: “All I’m sure of is that I kept going back and forth. / Sometimes I bumped into trees, / bumped into beggars. / I forced my way through a thicket of chairs and tables.”
Our little cracker box of a house could give you the adrenaline rush of fear, which means more frames of memory per second. Emotional memories are stored deep in the snake brain, which is probably why aphasics in nursing homes often cuss so much—that language doesn’t erode in a stroke.

INTERVIEWER

How do you account for your artistic sensibility? The environment you describe would seem to discourage one.

KARR

Mother—crazy as she was—had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop. Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town. You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.
People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.

INTERVIEWER

Was this a practice test?

KARR

No, it was the SAT itself—maybe the literature test. I just put my pencil down and started memorizing. Later I came across the poem in a library. It was “Storm Windows,” by Howard Nemerov. I wrote him a fan letter, to which he replied on Washington University stationery—it was like the Holy Grail, a note from a living poet. When I was twenty I met him at a reading he gave in the Twin Cities, and he said, You’re that little girl from Texas!
In grade school I memorized Frost and Cummings and I’d skim the plays of Shakespeare to find the speeches. I’d get dressed up in a sheet and do “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” or “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” for my hungover mother. So that language was weaving around my house like a cat through chair legs. At age twelve, I memorized Eliot’s “Prufrock.”

INTERVIEWER

If there were no real bookstores in your hometown, where did your mother get the books she gave you?

KARR

My mother went back to school for a teaching certificate, to a little college about forty-five minutes away. There was a college bookstore there. She took a class on existentialism and gave me Nausea and The Stranger and The Plague.

INTERVIEWER

How old were you?

KARR

Twelve. Who gives Nausea to a twelve-year-old? She brought home lots of things she read in class: Faulkner, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, and poetry—she knew I loved it.

INTERVIEWER

Did your mother push you to be a writer?

KARR

It wasn’t like Mozart’s daddy—she wasn’t a stage mother. She wasn’t that invested in child rearing. I was like a terrarium lizard you checked out from time to time with distracted curiosity. But anytime I called to run a poem by her, she’d deliver the full focus of her attention. She’d say, Oh, that’s great! It reminds me of the poem by so-and-so. My sister too. They were both great pom-pom shakers.

INTERVIEWER

What did you inherit from your father?

KARR

He was an unbelievably good raconteur. Spellbinding, and his idiom was pure poetry—“raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock” or “she’s got a butt like two bulldogs in a bag.”

INTERVIEWER

Did he train you to tell a good story, or did you just learn through observation?

KARR

Daddy’s family told stories. Everybody was a spot-on mimic—name a politician or a public figure, and my aunt Gladys could nail every intonation. Maybe it’s a Texas thing, or maybe it’s a Southern thing, or maybe there’s more of an oral tradition among the poor. Stranded out there on the prairie, settlers had to amuse themselves. When I went to California at seventeen, I wrote back to my sister saying, These people are boring because the weather’s so good they never had to develop an inner life.

http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/5992