Mary Karr on Wrestling with the Real

To begin this piece, let me be frank: after meeting her, I am an unabashed fan of Mary Karr as a person.

Being of a fan of her work is easy. Her first memoir, The Liar's Club, is credited by some with altering the rules of the genre. Her poetic line makes her nonfiction pop and her honesty drags that same poetry's toes through the mud so its arms can reach to the sky.

But what strikes me most about Karr is her pugnacious pursuit of real, carnal human representation. And this, I learned when she visited campus, begins and ends in her orientation toward life and grace as close-quarters combat. That is, if she's going to engage something - or someone - no punches are pulled, in writing or in conversation.

I think it's that drive toward real, personal experience that drives the authenticity in her work the most, at least from where I sit. When I read her third memoir, Lit, I suspected as much in passages like the following in which she describes her father’s final physical decline and her sense of culpability:

The day I moved Daddy to the hospital, he grabs my arm as we cross the lawn. I’m carrying his piss jug again. The checks I sent home never paid down the guilt I tote today for having disappeared from the pace he’s dying in, which is –in turn– a place dying in me….

Daddy’s last upright appearance was on the bar stool in the VFW, where one final shot of whiskey felled him the way German snipers had failed to. In an increasingly skeletal form, he kept breathing, though each week he’s sanded closer to the bone. But he’d been floating farther from me, starting when I’d left him–he’d left me? I never could decide–more than a decade before. 

The ambulance door seals me inside with him. Daddy’s good hand wipes his wet face then swats my hand away (117).

But it was in her remarks in a 2010 interview in Busted Halo where I found confirmation of my suspicion that Karr's confrontational honesty is the result of a deal with herself; it's the product of the same desire she found to get sober and turn toward faith.

"I think for me, my faith has been about realizing not that the suffering doesn’t exist, not that there isn’t evil….but now I accept mystery. There was no mystery for me before; I really thought I had it all figured out. And now I at least know I don’t know. I do believe that there is a loving and benevolent God who is omnipotent and all-powerful, and yet I believe Haiti happened. And I also believe at the nexus of suffering is where love is."

That's one of the best writing tips I took away from Karr's visit. Dogged honesty can't merely be the stuff of a writer's characters, but of a writer’s character as well. And for that to be the case, the writer must be willing to wrestle with their own dishonesty first before they attempt to bring truth to the page.

This is the fourth in a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. You can find the first two posts here, here, and here. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeannette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here.