Kris

“In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“I’ve said it’s hard. Here’s how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little. Between chapters of Stop-Time, Frank Conroy stayed drunk for weeks. Two hours after Carolyn See finished her first draft of Dreaming, she collapsed with viral meningitis, which gave her double vision: “It was my brain’s way of saying, ‘You’ve been looking where you shouldn’t be looking.’” Martin Amis reported a suffocating enervation while working on Experience. Writing fiction, however taxing, usually left him some buoyancy at day’s end; his memoir about his father drained him. Jerry Stahl relapsed while writing about his heroin addiction in Permanent Midnight.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“But whether you’re a memoirist or not, there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: it may continue to tug on you without your being aware of it. And lying about it can—for all but the most hardened sociopath—carve a lonely gap between your disguise and who you really are. The practiced liar also projects her own manipulative, double-dealing façade onto everyone she meets, which makes moving through the world a wary, anxious enterprise. It’s hard enough to see what’s going on without forcing yourself to look through the wool you’ve pulled over your own eyes…For the more haunted among us, only looking back at the past can permit it finally to become past.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club