Musings of a Midlife Mama and Other Stories

Last Thursday I drove by myself through hail and rain to see a live interview with  Mary Karr. Some of you who live in places in the country where there is real weather are rolling your eyes. Big deal, you say. But here in San Diego when we have on average maybe thirty days of rain and the rest of the time it’s sunny, this is a big deal. We swerve when there is a sprinkle. You can only imagine the mayhem when there is actual rain.

Now I’ve piqued your interest, haven’t I? Who is this Mary Karr person who would put me in danger, in a car, at night, driving thirty-five miles through inclement weather (think San Diego)? I’ll tell you. She’s a memoirist who some say single-handedly launched the contemporary memoir movement with her memoir, “The Liars’ Club.” I confess I bought the memoir when it was first published because it got so much buzz for Karr’s razor sharp wit and black comedy about her crazy mother and drunk father. I read the first few pages. Was a mother who set her house on fire while Mary and her sister slept funny? No.  No, it wasn’t.

Twenty years passed, when I was writing my own memoirs, before I could pick up, “The Liars’ Club,” and find the beauty (I never, ever found it funny)  in the way Karr wrote.  I was humbled by Karr’s storytelling and her in your face, raw honesty.  Bravo, I yelled when I finished the memoir.

When her latest memoir came out, “Lit,” I immediately bought it and read the heart wrenching story of how she became an alcoholic (No duh after reading “The Liars’ Club”) and how she found Catholicism…not an easy feat…even for those born to it like me.  I was blown away again by Karr’s ability to turn her truth into something universal.

Now do you see why I would drive through sleet and snow (or in my case drizzle and wind) to spend a moment with Mary Karr (and two hundred of her other fans).  But if you’ve never read her or if so far I haven’t convinced you of her brilliance, her is a list of the reasons why I like Mary Karr.

1. She’s a spitfire.  She’s funny.  Really funny.  She says things like, “A dysfunctional family is one with more than one person in it.”  When asked about sharing her memoir with her mom and what would have happened if she would have said don’t print it, Karr responded, “My mom didn’t say ‘no’ to anything, including her eight husbands.  She wasn’t going to say ‘no’ to me.”  About her ex-husband she said, “He was a WASP.  I didn’t know how he felt when we were sleeping together.”
2. She’s honest.  She considers herself a poet.  The only reason she writes memoirs is to pay the bills.  Karr quoted Samuel Johnson who said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
   
3. She’s smart.  She quotes Sufi poetry off the top of her head.  She teaches at Syracuse University.
4. She’s unapologetic about her conversion to Catholicism.  When a closet Catholic at the interview asked her what her response was to all the bad things that were happening in the Catholic Church, Mary Karr said, “Any time there are humans and bureaucracy, there are bad things.  This isn’t about the church it’s about God.  Although I have to say the Protestants are kicking our ass.”
5. She gives advice about writing.  Here’s what she said that night:

• If you can do something other than writing, do it.
• Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite
• Believe people when they say your writing is crap.
• Read more and read better.  Elevate your reading.  Read the classics.
• There is too much crap being published.  Write better.  A good story always wins.

Finally, she quoted Samuel Beckett who said, “Fail Better.”   Beckett’s actual quote was “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”  When Karr was asked what this meant she said, “Take risks.  Write.  Fail.  Try again and again.”

When I left the auditorium, the rain had disappeared.  I was greeted by a full moon, the smell of the ocean and my mojo back to write, try again and to fail better.

I leave you with this.

And this because I bet you anything Mary Karr can dance…