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A CONVERSATION WITH MARY KARR The Conscience of a Writer: Telling the Truth in Poetry and Memoir

Fordham Center on Religion and Culture March 20, 2007 6 pm-7:30pm Fordham University 140 W. 62nd Street, New York, New York

PETER STEINFELS: Good evening and welcome to “The Conscience of a Writer,” a conversation with Mary Karr about truth in the writing of memoir and poetry, two areas where her work has won both prestigious prizes and a wide audience.

I am Peter Steinfels, Co-Director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, which is the sponsor of tonight’s forum and of other forums, conferences, and discussions on important developments in our culture that cannot be fully examined without serious attention to matters of faith and morality. …

We are delighted that Mary Karr is our guest and to have Brennan O’Donnell, Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill in the Bronx, to introduce her fully, to engage her in conversation for about an hour, and then to preside over questions from the audience.

Besides his position as Dean, Brennan is a professor of English at Fordham, a position he held for seventeen years at Loyola College in Maryland, where he also directed the Honors Program. With a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he has specialized in English poetry of the Romantic period and more recently in American Catholic writers. He has published two books on William Wordsworth, edited a collection of essays on Andre Debus, and is working on a book on contemporary American Catholic literature. Besides writing scholarly articles and reviews on a range of British and American authors, from 1994–2000 Dean O’Donnell also edited the important quarterly magazine Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education.

We are happy to put this evening’s forum in the capable hands of Brennan O’Donnell.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: Thank you, Peter.

It is my pleasure and honor to introduce Mary Karr, who is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, who will talk to us this evening about telling the truth in contemporary nonfiction memoir and poetry.

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One of my favorite of the many admiring blurbs that adorn paperback editions of Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club is by the recently departed Molly Ivins, who said of this first of her fellow Texan’s two best-selling memoirs: “This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a backup opinion. It’s like finding Beethoven in Hoboken.” She continues: “To have a poet’s precision of language and a poet’s insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, and ugliest places in America is an astonishing event.”

The Liars’ Club, which appeared in 1995 and was recently reissued in a tenth-anniversary edition, traces Mary Karr’s childhood in the oil-refinery town of Leechfield, Texas, with a brief sojourn in Colorado in the 1960s. Beginning with the harrowing act of thankfully averted family violence, the book proceeds to explore with fierce honesty, compassion, and wickedly sharp humor a family struggling to survive a volatile mix of inner demons, extraordinary desires, and hard times in an unforgiving place.

In calling it “the essential American story and a beauty,” Jonathan Yardley captured the book’s uncanny power to extract something larger than life and almost mythic from this intensely personal story of a single idiosyncratic family.

The book, published to rave reviews, spent more than a year on the New York Times’ best-seller list, was listed as a “best book of the year” by periodicals throughout the country, and won numerous awards, including the Martha Albrand Award given by PEN to the Best First Book of Nonfiction published that year.

In 2000, Mary Karr continued the story of Pete and Charlie Karr, a refinery worker married to a bohemian artist, and their two daughters, Lecia and Mary Marlene, in Cherry, which takes Mary’s story from the end of elementary school up to 1972, when she left home for good, setting out for California in a truck full of surfer friends and their pharmaceutical cornucopia. Few people, I think, would have the courage to shine this clear a light on their adolescence, that period of life that John Keats famously identified as “a hiatus of disease between the imaginative health of childhood and of adulthood.”

Karr’s commitment to telling the truth is evident from beginning to end, even — or especially — in retelling those moments of lacerating shame and embarrassment that most of us would, as she would put it, rather eat a bug than reveal.

Reviewers once again marveled at the accomplishment, noting the author’s ability to combine compassion and judgment, laughter, and deep insight into the dark places of the human heart. The book ended up, like Liars’ Club, on just about everyone’s best-book list, including the New York Times’ Best Books of 2000. 3 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

She is currently at work, so many of us will be happy to know, on the next installment of the story, titled Lit, in which she intends to continue the story through her college years at McAllister, graduate school at Goddard, the birth of her son in 1986, and up to her baptism in the Roman Catholic Church in 1996.

As Molly Ivins noted, “The key to Mary Karr’s accomplishment as a memoirist is her poet’s sensibility.” Before she broke into the world as a memoirist, Mary Karr was already known in the world of poetry, having published in most of the best journals and magazines — Parnassus, Paris Review, and Ploughshares — and having her work collected in two books, Abacus in 1987 and the Milton-haunted The Devil’s Tour in 1993. Since 1995, she has published in increasingly prestigious and selective periodicals — The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, for example — and has published two more books of poetry, Viper Rum, which appeared in 1998, and Sinners Welcome in 2006.

The last books have included powerful poems emerging from her long journey from agnosticism to belief, and eventually to Catholicism. Another notable feature of each of the last two books has been a major essay on poetry — or maybe I should say a major controversial essay on poetry. If you have read the memoirs and if you remember scenes — such as the one in which the seven-year-old Mary, perched in a chinaberry tree picking off enemies with a BB gun, upon discovery yelling a phrase that “easily was the worst thing anybody in Leechfield ever heard a kid say” – you won’t be surprised at the controversial part.

Viper Run included the essay “Against Decoration,” in which Karr went after what she saw as “a debilitating tendency towards the vague, emotionally inert, and prissily difficult in contemporary poetry” — kicking butt, as they might say in Texas — and the greatest offense in the poetry world, naming names, including bigwigs, such as James Merrill and (gasp!) John Ashbery.

In Sinners Welcome, she included as an afterword an essay commissioned by Poetry Magazine on the relation of her religious conversion to her poetry, “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer,” which recounts her coming to prayer initially as a desperate grasp for a life preserver and finding that the practice of prayer gradually had become the foundation of her life and art. Within a community in which poetry so often is valued as a secular answer to, and decidedly not a manifestation of, the religious impulse, “Facing Altars” is a controversial and courageous essay.

Readers of Mary Karr’s life, however, who have seen the courage with which she has faced much more existentially profound issues than acceptance in the world of poetic publishing, may be excused if they do not 4 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

see her resistance to the easy secularism of the literary establishment as her most courageous stance to date. As her father might say as he watched her roll up her sleeves for this fight, “I feel sorry for them boys, Pokey.”

Witness Mary’s January 15th New York Times op-ed piece on the controversy emanating from the revelation that James Frey had fabricated large portions of his supposed memoir, A Million Little Pieces. At a time when Frey, Oprah, and lots of other folks were hemming and hawing about whether or not what Frey did in presenting as fact things that were demonstrably not fact, fudging this way and that about poetic license and the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction, Mary Karr wrote Mr. Frey is “a skunk.” I have heard her in other interviews use rather more colorful language for him, including in an interview at Calvin College I heard her call him “a lying sack of doo-doo.”

MARY KARR: Not my most Christian moment.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: She continues in the op-ed piece: “Distinguishing between fiction and non- isn’t nearly the taxing endeavor some would have us believe. Sexing a chicken is way harder. The nitty- gritty of it is that a novelist creates events for truthful interpretation, whereas the memoirist tries to honestly interpret events plagiarized from reality. And here’s how readers know the difference: the label slapped on the jacket of the book.”

Which brings us to the topic of this evening’s conversation, “The Conscience of a Writer: Telling the Truth in Poetry and Memoir,” featuring Mary Karr.

MARY KARR: You know, when you’ve written a book called The Liars’ Club and you’ve been an agnostic all your life, you don’t really expect to find yourself in a Jesuit university talking about truth. So forgive me if I look a little misplaced, like I’ve gotten off the bus at the wrong stop.

I wanted to start with a poem — not my poem, but a poem by Archilochos, a Greek poet. This is translated by my colleague Brooks Haxton. It’s a poem called “Liar.” I said this poem when I was invited to the White House this year, and, despite the fact that I said it was a nonpartisan poem, I’m not sure I’ll be invited back.

The apocrypha, the story behind this poem, I always say Archilochos — somebody correct me — is fifth century before the Common Era. I think fifth or fourth, right on the cusp there. The story is Archilochos was promised this guy’s daughter in marriage and then the guy married her off to someone else. His response is “Liar.” I say this poem now partly because it shows the power of poetry over centuries, that this guy could be miffed at his buddy 5,000 years ago and we can still be amused by it; and 5 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture also, in some ways, you can see the origins of rap music in this poem.

Liar Swept overboard, helpless among the breakers, strangled with seaweed, May you wake in a gelid surf, Your teeth already cracked into shingle, Set rattling by the wind, While on all fours, helpless as a poisoned cur, you puke brine reeking of dead fish. May those you meet, barbarians as ugly as their souls are hateful, treat you to the moldy wooden bread of slaves. And, with your split teeth sunk in that, Smile, then, as you did when speaking as my friend.

Isn’t that good? The power of poetry. I read that because I think it exemplifies how people feel about being lied to, no matter what is at stake.

I was surprised that everybody wasn’t more mad at James Frey. I’ve since come to be less mad at him. But I was kind of horrified at two things.

One was when I saw him on “Larry King Live,” when he said, “There’s a great debate going on between memoirists and amongst themselves about what does and doesn’t constitute truth.”

I don’t know every memoirist writing memoir today, but I know Tobias Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff, Maxine Hong Kingston, John Edgar Wideman, Frank Conroy, James Richardson, and vis-à-vis this elaborate discussion about what is and isn’t true going on, it is not happening. It’s just not happening, any more than reporters at the New York Times are wondering if Jason Blair, who is this guy who got busted for making all the stuff up, is on to something.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: So why do you think that the story had such legs, then? Why did it burst upon the scene and people thought that it was raising serious and interesting questions?

MARY KARR: William Gass wrote a piece on memoir the year before I published The Liars’ Club — it must have been in 1994 — in Harper’s. It was called “Narcissism in the Age of Memoir.” Somewhere in the second or third paragraph, he says, “To have written a memoir is already to have made yourself a monster.” You know, harsh words.

If you think about it, Geoffrey Wolff told me back in graduate school, it’s an outsider’s art. Unless you’re Winston Churchill or Elizabeth Taylor, somebody people are interested in, why would you write your memoirs? It’s sort of like being able to put the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice or 6 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

something, kind of a curiosity.

I think partly that is right. I mean what are we doing? We are displaying our wounds in public. We’re confessing the smaller sin to hide the larger sin — which I do in the confessional all the time, my priest will tell you.

Although I was in there, weeping, a couple of weeks ago, and he said, “Calm down, calm down. Let’s start with the Ten Commandments. Have you murdered anybody?” I need that. I need Baby Jesus more than I can say.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: You say in the Frey piece that Geoffrey Wolff said to you something, “Take no care for your dignity in writing memoir.” Can you expand a little bit on that as advice and what he meant by that and what you found?

MARY KARR: I had fallen in love with memoir as a little girl. In 1965, I actually had this journal — it is the only journal I have — that says, “When I grow up I will write half poetry and half autobiography.” You know, talk about strange. My sister and I tried to remember what memoirs we had read, other than Helen Keller’s. As I said in the James Frey op-ed piece, if it had turned out that Helen Keller wasn’t blind and deaf and was just like a little hard of hearing and nearsighted, I would have been extremely, extremely disappointed.

I am not answering your question, though, which was?

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: The issue of dignity, “take no care for your dignity.”

MARY KARR: He said, “Take no care for your dignity. Don’t be afraid of appearing mean-spirited, small-minded, scheming, or anything else. Tell your stories and your story will be revealed.” At one point he says, “And don’t use your life as a tree to be shaken for its cautionary fruits, as a kind of morality tale. Just say what happened. Stick to what happened.”

I’m thinking very fast right here, as one does when one finds oneself in this position.

I think when you read the James Frey book — and I don’t want to spend too long hopping up and down on this guy — who did out-earn me, by the way — but I really do kind of feel sorry for him, for reasons that will become clear later. If you gave Vin Diesel — those of you who haven’t read the book — a pot of coffee and a tape recorder, this is the book that would have come out.

One of his lines was, when someone said, “You didn’t go to AA to get 7 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

sober,” he says, “No, I’ve always handled pain alone. I tend to handle pain alone.” None of us handle pain alone. It’s the great thing about being human, that there are other ones who also feel this way.

And there is a scene where he is allegedly in rehab and they won’t give him Novocain or something. He gets on an airplane, he’s got a hole in his cheek, and they let him on this airplane, bleeding and high.

At one point, he says he’s in jail for three months. It turns out he had a parking violation in an Ohio college town and they brought him into the police station and his friend came and bailed him out. He didn’t even spend the night there.

So it is a book really written to make him look like a tough guy. My sense of writing a book like this is if you say what happened, the reader is going to know you’re an asshole in some way, is just going to know that.

In my books, the biggest asshole is almost always me. I mean it pretty much always is me. That’s because I don’t really know what motivates most other people. If you write a book in which you shoot at people with a BB gun, you’re not really representing yourself as a moral titan or someone in whose footsteps you would want to follow.

I always tell people who are writing these books that the reader will be very forgiving of your foibles as long as you are honest with him. But if the reader knows something about you that you don’t know yourself, then you have failed as a writer. So if the reader knows, as in this Frey book, that you’re trying to rooster around and make yourself look like a tough guy and you don’t seem to know that about yourself, the reader is not going to trust you, doesn’t trust you to tell the truth.

I was always astonished that so many people did believe the book, because I read it and just thought “it’s a lot of horse dookie.”

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: I remember listening to you in the Calvin interview. You said something about the style of the book, to the effect that it was the style that betrayed him; even if the Web site, thesmokinggun.com, had not discovered and gone and looked at the police records and found out that he got a parking ticket rather than three months in jail, that a good reader would be able to have discerned that because the style lies in a way. Can you talk a little more about how that happens?

MARY KARR: We see it in bad fiction too. You know, you read a bad story or a bad novel, where the writer might be trying to make you feel something that he or she doesn’t give you evidence for why you should feel that way; they’re just trying to steer you around. So it was just badly 8 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

written. I mean the sentences were not very good or very interesting. Again, I think I meant that overriding sense of his own motives or how he needed to be perceived was so transparent.

People have asked me why was I compelled to write this story. I always say, “Money,” which is true. Really, if I hadn’t needed the money, I would never have dragged myself and my family through this. And again, I think when people are suspicious of the motives of memoirists — you know, you cash in.

Although my mother really doesn’t care what you all think about her, God rest her soul. When she was alive, as she said, “If I cared what they thought, I would have been baking cookies and going to PTA meetings instead of getting married seven times.” So you weren’t exactly dealing with someone like Trish Hampl’s mother, my friend Patricia Hampl, whose mother didn’t want her to reveal to the world that she had been epileptic.

In my family, there are much more in some ways egregious sins. But I think there is also a lot of explanation for why my mother had a psychotic episode and tried to kill me with a butcher knife when I was a kid. To some extent, my sense of truth, I wouldn’t — well, there were two things. I didn’t want to look like this Dickensian orphan, this kind of Oliver Twist’y chimneysweep, because I’m not like that, and it would be transparent to anyone who knew me that I wasn’t like that.

And yes, I was sexually assaulted as a child — I’m sure a lot of you were as well — and yes, bad things have happened to me, but I grew up. People survived Auschwitz.

But it also felt very important to me that people love my mother. When they ask why I did this, I think the sort of unconscious reason — or maybe a truer reason, maybe not — was that I have always written to sort of immortalize my beloveds. To get to spend a day writing about my mother or about my father is to have the power of resurrection almost, spend time with them.

But also to tell the truth of that story in which — you know, I said to mother, “Mother, you know” — I warned them in advance, my family — “I’m going to write about you having a psychotic episode and trying to kill me with a butcher knife.”

My mother said, “Oh, get it off your chest.”

My sister, the Republican, is actually much more circumspect. She is a businesswoman and is a much more circumspect person.

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But in terms of the issues that are brought up, truth or lies, in terms of the Frey controversy, we all knew what happened. I would tend not to write about something unless I were pretty sure I knew basically what the events were.

One thing that memoirs do now that they didn’t do, say, in the 1950s, when Mary McCarthy wrote Memories of a Catholic Girlhood — you know, she has a big preface at the beginning of that book, 1946, in which she says, “I didn’t take notes as a child. Conversations took place that covered this kind of material, but I wasn’t working from notes.” She felt responsible for explaining to the reader.

In 1946 there was still some sense of objective history, some sense of truth that didn’t come with quotation marks around it. You believed that when scientists published a study it was because they hadn’t fabricated the events in it, and that when a priest said something that he was a 100 percent honorable person in that position — or rabbi or imam, pick your slot.

By the time I was writing Liars’ Club, I think the reader understood that I am writing out of memory and that’s an innately corrupt form, so that I could reconstitute dialogue. I could leave out whole years when stuff didn’t happen.

At one point, I make a thirteen-year leap in The Liars’ Club. My editor kept calling me. They had given me this advance. I’d thought it was huge. I think it was like — I don’t know — $3,000. She kept calling me saying, “How are you going to get across that thirteen-year gap?” I finally called her one day and said, “How about ‘thirteen years later, comma?’ We’ll do it that way.”

The reader understands that I am not writing the history of Mary Karr for perpetuity, but that I am recreating an internal subjective experience.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: What is the difference in your mind between autobiography and memoir?

MARY KARR: I didn’t know there was one. People ask me that all the time. I don’t know. I thought they were the same thing.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: So you have fulfilled your childhood promise of writing half autobiography.

MARY KARR: I have written half autobiography. That’s a really strange thing to have written and find yourself doing.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: I think some people would say something 10 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

along the lines, just on your issue of memory — Patricia Hampl was here just a couple of weeks ago, and she said something along the lines of — she wasn’t really distinguishing autobiography from memoir — but she said, “When you’re reading memoir, you’re not so much interested in the truth of the experience but the truth of the memory.” Does that distinction make sense to you?

MARY KARR: To me in both of them that’s the case. What did she say the other one was?

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: She was sort of making the distinction. She was saying when you go to memoir, you’re not so concerned about the Mary McCarthy element of it, is this actually transcribed from reality. There’s a layer in there of memory.

MARY KARR: Exactly. I knew the brothers Wolff, Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff, when I was twenty-two, and they were a generation ahead of me when I went to graduate school. Geoffrey was working on a great memoir, called The Duke of Deception. He had worked with Ted White at Princeton, I think. He used a historian’s tools. He interviewed his mother and transcribed the tapes, and he looked up his father’s prison records and hospital records. It was an act of history, his memoir. Toby wrote This Boy’s Life, and later Pharaoh’s Army, as an act of memory.

When I don’t remember something, to me the forgetting of it in some ways — I don’t worry that I have to cover every base, because I always say that a really good memoir, the central conflict might seem to be with an external circumstance but it is really with the writer.

One of the things missing from the James Frey memoir, which is missing in a lot of bad fiction, is any sense of a deep inner life. He thought that these events that happened to him on the surface were what was interesting.

I don’t think that. I think all of you suffer enormously, and all of you wrestle with moral quandaries every day, and all of you have great tragedies in your lives. You bury people you love, and you will die someday. I think I’m going to get under the wire on that, but you guys are goners eventually.

So I don’t think it’s the external events. I think it’s two things that make a good memoir.

One is the development of the character of the writer over the course of the book. Tobias Wolff’s book, This Boy’s Life, seems to be — he’s got this abusive stepfather who has beaten the crap out of him, won’t buy him nice shoes, makes him shell horse chestnuts with his bare hands. He’s just a 11 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

real jerk, played by Robert De Niro in the movie. But it is really Toby as you read the book. In the movie, it looks like it’s Robert De Niro, which is what movies do — it’s very reductive.

But in the book you see that Toby is very unkind to his very best friend, who’s gay, when the kid kisses him, makes a pass at him, and he starts beating up other kids. Is he going to be as big a bully as his stepfather as a way of becoming a man? You know, he doesn’t have a father. He is looking for a way to be a man.

He keeps putting on these uniforms throughout the book — he’s going to be a Boy Scout, he has a Boy Scout uniform; basketball uniform; goes to a prep school, gets a tweed jacket. Then, towards the end of the book, he says, “All I needed was a war.” Careful what you wish for. So for me that book had this great psychological conflict.

When you read Primo Levy’s Survival in Auschwitz, what’s great about that book is not that he represents all the cruelties that have been chronicled by the Third Reich, every dot and title, but he talks about getting in line for soup with his aged, infirm father, and his father offering him the extra peas, or whatever, from his soup, and knowing if he takes them his father will die, and he takes them. You read that and you know that’s true.

No one would say, “Have you remembered that?” Those are the things we remember, aren’t they? Those are the things we wish we could forget. So for me a memoir, if you’re writing in first person, unless you’re giving the inner life and the inner complications of that kind of act —

The other thing you need — I said you need two things — is I think you need an inner conflict that involves the writer’s character over the course of the book.

And I think you need a voice that’s very particular and very interesting. James Frey’s voice just wasn’t that interesting. He’s just not that good a writer.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: If I have the chronology right of the trajectory of your spiritual journey into the Church and the writing of Liars’ Club, the beginning of the writing of that book pretty much coincides with your turn to prayer?

MARY KARR: Absolutely.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: Can you talk about that a little bit? You say you wrote The Liars’ Club for money.

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MARY KARR: I did.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: Okay. But also what was going on there in terms of the writing of that book and that journey? What was the relationship between those?

MARY KARR: Well, I had written two books of poetry, and I couldn’t stop drinking, and I had this little baby that I felt didn’t eat if I didn’t feed him. Both my parents — my father had drunk himself to death; my mother had been an alcoholic. I just couldn’t stop drinking. I had always been able to stop drinking before. It’s very funny when you talk to an alcoholic and they say, “Oh, I can stop drinking.” It’s just you can’t stay stopped. I had always been able to stop, but I just couldn’t stop drinking. I was driving into stuff. It was bad.

I looked pretty good on the outside. I was teaching at Harvard, married to this Harvard ex-hockey player, in grad school. We had this house. We had this little, blonde, blue-eyed baby. I looked pretty good. But I couldn’t stop drinking.

Someone finally suggested prayer. Actually, what she said was, “Get on your knees in the morning and ask God to keep you away from a drink, and get on your knees at night and thank God for doing that.”

I was like, “You know, I don’t believe in God. I was a philosophy major. It’s a lot of horse shit. You want me to go talk to the dolls in the church?” And I said, “What kind of God wants me to get on my knees?” She said, “You don’t do it for God, you asshole.” I was astonished by that. I said, “Really, you don’t do it for God? Then why do you do it?” She said, “You do it so that you understand your position in the world” — which I still didn’t understand, but I did it in a very mechanical way.

Then I had two other experiences. A friend of mine gave me the Saint Francis Prayer, which may or may not be attributed to Saint Francis — I’m sure somebody here knows — “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace; where there is hatred, let me so love,” et cetera, “where there is conflict, pardon.” I heard that prayer, I read that prayer, and I thought, “This is pretty hard to argue with, that you should wish for these things, that if you wish for these things that those would be good things to wish for.”

So I started praying with my little boy, who was by then, let’s say, three- and-a-half or four. So I had no intention of going into the Church, but suddenly prayer became very important to me.

I had another friend, who also suggested that as I went through the day, if something good happened to me, I should say, “Thanks, God.” As soon as I started doing that, I realized that there was this whole aspect to my 13 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

experience, with all these great things that happened to me, that, because I’m so dark and serotonin-challenged, I never noticed before. People would stop when your car broke down and help you, and they weren’t Charles Manson; people would come help you change your dang tire. Somebody would get your kid’s ball and roll it back to him. You’d yell, “Augie, Augie,” and the dog would come up the walk — that some miracle would happen, and I had been blind to those things. So I began to see.

It was a couple of years of doing that before I — well, I’ll tell you something. The other thing the person said was, “Just pray every day for thirty days and see if your life gets better. What do you have to lose?”

So I was like, “Okay, I’ll do that. But this is horse shit. Okay.”

But I prayed with a really surly attitude. My life got better. I mean it is just undisputable. I also started to feel something south of my neck, is what I always say. Somewhere in the middle of my chest, I just felt this stillness or this sense of comfort or rightness or presence that I had never had in my life.

I began making decisions in my life informed out of praying. So I would say, “Vis-à-vis, should I try to write a memoir?” I mean this is the kind of thing I’d pray for. I never got any big, long-term answers. You know, it was always something like “go eat food” or “have a bath” or “go to church,” something real simple. But in making decisions they were guided by prayer.

So I tell people, “I was making $9,000 a year, I started praying, and then my income increased 100 times.” I know that doesn’t always happen, believe me — because I’ve been buying lottery tickets ever since — but, if you watch Mother Teresa, it kind of does always happen. There is a great documentary on her.

What I wanted to write about and how I wanted to write when I was twelve years old became what I was writing about in The Liars’ Club and later Cherry, I think.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: I would be remiss if I didn’t give the audience a chance to hear you read and hear your voice. In talking about the issue of people helping you with a flat tire and they’re not Charles Manson, it reminded me of a lovely passage in here. Maybe you could read this. I think you’ll know this. It’s this paragraph that I’m interested in. Do you recognize where the saying comes from?

MARY KARR: I haven’t read this book since I published it.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: Okay. Then I will provide the context. You 14 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture are in Colorado, and things get so bad with your mother that your sister decides you’re out of there, and she engineers an escape from Colorado back to Texas. You end up somehow on a plane from Colorado to Texas that ends up in Mexico.

MARY KARR: We had a drunk coal miner take us. We got on the wrong plane.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: This is a paragraph about how the airlines helped you to get to Texas.

MARY KARR: Right.

Lecia and I meandered back to Daddy through an underworld of airport personnel. Pilots, baggage handlers, stews, and off-duty janitors washed us and fed us. We traveled gratis, without corporate okay. Not only were we never menaced or pinched, beaten, or buggered, we never stared with longing at a deck of cards or a chocolate donut that some stranger didn’t ante up for it. Their particular faces had been worn featureless as stones, but those uniforms I walked next to at waist level proved that hope may not be so foolish. Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild. Elsewise, every raped baby would grow up to be a rapist.

That’s pretty good.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: I love “kindness grows wild.” That’s lovely.

On that issue, if I may, reading The Devil’s Tour, an earlier work, one doesn’t see a lot of scenes like that —

MARY KARR: Into my drinking I wrote that book.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: — where kindness breaks out from sources, from unlikely places. But more and more it seems to me, particularly in the new book of poems, you are exploring that territory, you are allowing yourself to be happy, to look at happy subjects.

You say in “Facing Altars” that one of the biggest aesthetic challenges for you right now is joy.

MARY KARR: It’s really hard to write about joy. There is a famous saying that everybody attributes to Tolstoy but was really Guy de Maupassant, “happiness writes white,” which means nothing happens. Like Tolstoy’s “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is 15 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture unhappy in its own way.” So it is hard for me write about joy, and yet I feel that that’s what I’m supposed to be writing about.

Can I read a poem about my little boy?

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: Sure.

MARY KARR: There’s still more crucifixion than resurrection in this book, but it’s moving in the right direction.

I always say when my son drove away in my car when he was sixteen years old by himself that if I had seen an antelope behind the wheel of my car, I would have had more confidence that the car was going to come back. So this is about that moment. This is an example of my trying to write from joy.

A Blessing From my Sixteen Years’ Son I have this son who assembled inside me during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared, in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled. Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras. Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.

Look at the muscled obelisk of him now pawing through the icebox for more grapes. Sixteen years and not a bone broken, nor single stitch. By his age, I was marked more ways, and small.

He’s a slouching six-foot, three, with implausible blue eyes, which settle on the pages of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” with profound belligerence. A girl with a navel ring could make his cell phone go buzz,

or an Afro-ed boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell-- creatures strange to me as dragons or eels.

Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel arcane as any oracle’s. Rodney claims school is harshing my mellow. Case longs to date a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman willing to do stuff she’ll regret. They’ve come to lead my son into his broadening spiral. Someday soon, the tether will snap. I birthed my own mom into oblivion.

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The night my son smashed the car fender then rode home in the rain-streaked cop car, he asked, Did you and Dad screw up so much?

He’d let me tuck him in, my grandmother’s wedding quilt from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t blame us, I said. You’re your own idiot now. At which he grinned.

The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy took it hard. He’d found my son awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights, where he’d draped his own coat over her shaking shoulders. My fault, he’d confessed right off.

Nice kid, said the cop.

In that poem nothing happens, or a very small thing happens, but for me it was one of those moments. When the cop told me this, I had such joy — although I said, “You can lie when it’s a question of your insurance going up. Jesus doesn’t mind.” I didn’t actually tell him that, but I wanted to.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: As long as we’re on poetry — you were talking about your spiritual director — I wonder if you could read a poem that I just found amazing here, and I assume this is the woman you’re talking to who told you that “it wasn’t God who needed you to pray, asshole.”

MARY KARR: Sister Maurice May, yes.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: The one about the meek, “Who the Meek Are Not.”

MARY KARR: It’s so great.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: This is just a lovely poem.

MARY KARR: I did the Ignatian exercises under the Nineteenth Annotation. If you’re a layperson, you can do them over this thirty-week time period. I had this great Franciscan nun spiritual advisor. She was the one who explained to me the word “meek.” I would say, “Come on with the meek.”

She also told me — I said, “What about turn the other cheek? I mean how far does that go?” — “You only have two cheeks,” which I thought was kind 17 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

of great. She explained the word “meek” was not what I thought it meant. So “Who the Meek Are Not” is the name of this poem: Who the Meek Are Not Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep in the rice paddy muck, nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles make the wheat fall in waves they don’t get to eat. My friend the Franciscan nun says we misread that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them. To understand the meek (she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop in a meadow, who — at his master’s voice — seizes up to a stunned but instant halt. So with the strain of holding that great power in check, the muscles along the arched neck keep eddying, and only the velvet ears prick forward, awaiting the next order.

She was so great.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: So you did the Nineteenth Annotation spiritual exercises. One of the fruits of that are five poems in here called “Descending Theology.”

MARY KARR: Right.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: They are really ordered on the weeks of the spiritual exercises pretty much — the meditation on the nativity, on the life of Christ, garden, crucifixion, resurrection.

MARY KARR: Right.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: Which are really seeded through the book, like its spine sort of.

MARY KARR: Yes. That’s how I intended the book to be grouped around, to begin in suffering and death and end in resurrection. That was my big, fat plan. Such a unique way to organize a book, isn’t it? The New Testament works the same way.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: You said you’re working on the resurrection. Maybe you can read the last of those poems, on the Resurrection. 18 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

MARY KARR: Okay.

Descending Theology: The Resurrection From the far star points of his pinned extremities, cold inched in — black ice and blood ink — till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void even for pain, he missed his splintered feet, the human stare buried in his face. He ached for two hands made of meat he could reach to the end of. In the corpse's core, the stone fist of his heart began to bang on his stiff chest's door, and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now it's your limbs he longs to flow into, from the sunflower center in your chest outward, as warm water shatters at birth, rivering every way.

I feel like such a hypocrite reading these poems about Jesus. I really do. I just feel like a lightning bolt is going to come and the big “how dare you.” How dare I?

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: Just to return to the issue of telling the truth and how you’re able to tell the truth, when you’re looking at some pretty dark stuff and the relationship between the capacity for joy and the ability to tell the truth — I’m not sure if I can formulate this question satisfactorily — but I’ve always asked the question of myself whether or not you really can look very deeply into the abyss without the resurrection.

MARY KARR: Yeah, drink a fifth of Jack Daniels every day.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: But I mean as a writer do you find that — I remember when you said you first discovered the “Lord make me an instrument of your peace” prayer, you said you were with it right until the last two lines, “In dying we gain eternal life.”

MARY KARR: It’s before that, in the master part.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: Right, the master you couldn’t handle. But also, the dying and eternal life, you said something like, “Oh, that’s bullshit.” But the rest of it worked for you, right?

MARY KARR: Right.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: But in exploring these poems in which you 19 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

are allowing yourself to imagine the possibility of the resurrection, I’m wondering — it’s almost a technical question — do you find that that girds you to be stronger in your looking straight at the dark?

MARY KARR: Absolutely, absolutely. It also makes your moral life more complicated. As soon as you begin to look at the world not the way God looks at the world you’re lying in a way. As soon as you begin to write about this thing instead of that thing, you’ve begun to shape a narrative, you’re leaving stuff out.

So can I write about being sexually assaulted unless, morally speaking, I write about the sexual assault that probably occurred to the boy who raped me when I was a kid?

In a sense, what the narratives leave out is two-dimensional, is any ability to imagine other people’s suffering, I think. And yet, if you don’t do that, then you’re in The Inferno, I think, your whole life really, right, don’t you think?

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: Um-hum.

MARY KARR: I mean it’s hot in the summer, and I get on the subway and I want to shoot everybody. I understand that. That’s why I got baptized. I need help. Somebody said to me, “like this is a crutch,” and I was like “Yeah, absolutely!” If you’ve been walking dragging your right leg behind you your whole life, you decide that you want a crutch.

I’m not sure that answers your question. You look long enough into the abyss — what part am I leaving out?

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: You’ve really answered the question. It’s just, not being an imaginative writer myself, I’ve always wondered about the question. Frequently, the secular world will look at belief in the resurrection as an aversion, as an attempt to close one’s eyes to the reality of suffering. But it seemed to me often —

MARY KARR: Good luck.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: — in writer after writer after writer, it seems to me that what I value about writers who are open to the possibility of the resurrection is that it seems to give them a kind of a strength —

MARY KARR: I believe in the resurrection.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: — to be able to look much more clear- sightedly at the reality of evil in a way that is not possible —

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MARY KARR: One way I developed a sense of faith was to realize that I was afraid all my life, as a kind of rationalist, to engage in magical thinking. I realized I had no problem thinking the universe had conspired against me to take my parking place. I had no problem believing there was a force for evil that conspired to keep me from getting that job at Harvard that I had interviewed for, those rat bastards. I had no problem that I was engaged all the time in magical thinking. As I told Toby Wolff, I’ve memorized the bad news. I know what the bad news is.

But, yeah, I see suffering all the time. To some extent, one of the things I was mad at God about when I did the exercises — people say, “Oh, you’re so tough,” blah, blah, blah — I grew up in a tough place, but I’m a candy ass, I’m a big sissy. I was the nerdy girl in the library reading Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. You know, I’m a big nerdball.

But one of the things I was mad about is I am very sensitive. I’m sensitive. Most writers are; certainly most poets are. Why would you put me in the situation where there was all this suffering and I would be sensitive, that I would have so little skin? I think it’s part of what I am supposed to do, is to see suffering.

If you live in New York City, you see it every day. You can’t not look at it. You can’t not see it.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: I want to make sure to give the audience a chance to ask questions.

But I wondered if we might end this part of the conversation with a poem on your mother, since she really is in a sense the beginning, middle, and end of Liars’ Club. It’s a book that really is generated by an attempt to understand her. I’m sure you can define it better than I can.

MARY KARR: My mother was so funny. She was so great. I was just at my sister’s house and we were talking about her.

She gave me Sartre’s Nausea to read when I was about eleven years old. I asked her when I grew up, “What were you thinking?” She was like, “Well, I just wanted to prepare you for what was going to happen.” For those of you who don’t know, Sartre’s Nausea is this book about this guy who just wants to throw up every time he sees anything. It’s like this dark, existentialist — you know, wear black, smoke Gauloise, sit in the café. This poem is partly about that.

Is that the one you intended, or the other one?

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: The forgiveness poem.

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MARY KARR: “Overdue Pardon for Mother with Knife.” My mother did try to kill me with a butcher knife — not very hard, but it did happen anyway. It was one of those moments. That night is the night that opens The Liars’ Club. It’s one of those moments that you could not remember. One of the things about traumatic memory that they say is that it is actually stored in a different part in your brain and that certain things about it are actually — you might have a static picture. I have a couple of static pictures of that night that were very powerful images for me and very vivid. I went to therapy when I was very young, like nineteen, partly because those of those images and the conflicts I had with this stuff. I used to when I was younger wake up screaming every night, like four or five nights a week, thinking somebody was trying to kill me, leaning over me trying to kill me.

Overdue Pardon for Mother With Knife Some nights I startle up from sleep to gasp down your death again like a draft of venom, and feel I'm five, and see your flame-eyed shape raise the knife you failed to bury in my chest — whose gleam can still flash across some desert in me, searing me awake. I no longer curse that hand, as I once did, But glorify the force that stayed it, that set the blade aside.

Last week, in the city you love most, The Paradise that my birth stole you from, I paused at a shop window where spring heels floated above staggered pedestals, as if tiptoeing some drunken stair up to the invisible. Through the mist barrier, your stair became a flicker in the glass, Then, holding my face as if I were a gift, Your hands, which grown now on the ends of my arms. It was me, astonished, inside you. Again, in the chest the heart’s aperture is not a dagger slot, And it opened. There was the old resolve I found in my youth To guzzle down breath like sweet spirits, As if a pillow just slid off my face.

Thank you.

BRENDAN O’DONNELL: Thank you very much.

MARY KARR: Thank you. You’re so good, I want you to come on the road with me.

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BRENDAN O’DONNELL: I’d like to open up for questions from the audience. I think that there are folks with microphones. If you have a question, please raise your hand and someone will come to you with a microphone.

MARY KARR: I love it. It’s like “Oprah.” There’s a man close to a microphone.

QUESTION: My real question is to ask about Augustine. But also I want to say it’s interesting that a woman like you would enter the Catholic Church at this point in time —

MARY KARR: Interesting they’d have me.

QUESTIONER: — where there’s such a surge for women’s rights and transparency in the Church…. But about Augustine who wrote the first memoir maybe, or first autobiography.

MARY KARR: I think that is the first memoir.

QUESTIONER: …How authentic do you think that is? There’s an author, James O’Donnell, who says about Augustine that this man more or less was his own press agent, and that he never would have been known if it weren’t for his Confessions.

MARY KARR: Yes, right, his conversion story.

QUESTIONER: So from an authentic point of view, how do you see the Confessions?

MARY KARR: You know, it’s funny. I always assumed he was a saint, like he wouldn’t make stuff up. He doesn’t come off that good in a lot of the Confessions. He’s the guy who said, “Give me chastity, Lord, but not yet,” and had a mistress for a long time.

I teach that memoir a lot. My students always complain about it. I say, “Well, what if Augustine was a sex addict? What if this is a disordered attachment to pleasure, as it seemed to be in him? It seemed to be the thing that kept him from God.”

I have all kinds of opinions that the Pope wouldn’t like about women and the Church, the celibacy of priests, gay marriage, and just wads of things that I’ll be struck dead for mentioning. But we are the body of Christ, I think.

So I assumed, to go back to your other comment — and every time I pick up my priest, the guy who baptized me, who’s ninety years old, now retired 23 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

— I see him in Syracuse; every time I’m there, I’d take him for dinner — he always gets in my car and says, “You still Catholic?” I say, “Joe, you think it didn’t take?”

“Well, there’s a lot of controversy now, a lot of controversy.”

Yes, I assume that that was an honest memoir. I didn’t read the James O’Donnell about how maybe it’s all — you think he made up all the stuff he did?

QUESTIONER: What O’Donnell said is that at the end of [Augustine’s] life there was the barbarian invasion coming on, and O’Donnell says, if I’m relating him correctly, that Augustine made sure all his works were preserved for posterity, realizing that people would remember him.

MARY KARR: I’m way more venal. I’d drop my books from helicopters if I could get a buck apiece for them. So, on a scale of one-to-one, things that Augustine did, that just — I see what you mean, though, that he was like Frey, say, this kind of self-aggrandizing or show-off’y kind of saint.

QUESTIONER: Looking at the memoir, since you’re so acute in interpreting it, did you feel that it’s authentic, the Confessions itself?

MARY KARR: I guess I did. I assumed he was—

QUESTIONER: You said he’s a saint.

MARY KARR: Yes. The same thing with Mother Teresa.

QUESTIONER: So you suspend your disbelief when it comes to saints?

MARY KARR: I really do.

QUESTIONER: You don’t become the critic anymore?

MARY KARR: I really do. I mean same thing with Interior Castle. I guess I do. I would assume if you’re stupid enough to be called by God to do something like this, you wouldn’t muck about with it. But maybe I’m naïve.

Yes, ma’am?

QUESTION: I don’t need a microphone. I’m loud.

MARY KARR: Okay. Go ahead.

QUESTIONER: I got excited. I thought you were going to talk about 24 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

Augustine Burroughs. What do you think about him?

MARY KARR: I didn’t think he was much of a writer either. I’ve got to say I’m a tough crowd. My favorite memoirs are Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Rousseau, the essays of Montaigne. I just don’t think it was that well written. I loved the movie. I wasn’t crazy about the book, but I loved the movie.

Yes, sir?

QUESTION: It’s so inspiring to hear a writer talk about reconciling yourself with who you wish you weren’t, whether that involves…. Do you ever find yourself, you as a writer, at odds with your natural emotional connection to a memory? In other words, when examining a memory of yours, either in your writing or just in your personal introspection, do you find yourself compelled to exaggerate the pain or the pleasure attached to that memory for the sake of good reading?

MARY KARR: I don’t know. I run pretty hot. I’m a pretty intense person. Anyone who knows me would allege that. There’s a kid in my neighborhood I hit with a shovel, who still says every time I see him says, “Remember when you hit me with that shovel?” I’m like, “Yeah, I’m sorry, Edward. You didn’t have any I.Q. points to lose, and I know I knocked a couple loose.”

So am I ever at odds with myself to make up stuff?

QUESTIONER: No, not to make it up, but to feel like you should have felt a certain way toward this event.

MARY KARR: No. In my books I talk to the reader. One of the things I was urged by my first editor at Viking to do was to invent a story where I’m saying good-bye to my mother when we’re leaving Colorado.

She said, “It must have been a terrible, sad thing to leave your mother.” My mother’s wagging her pistol, shooting my stepfather. “She owns a bar, she’s drinking all day, and you’re worried about her, leaving her. It wasn’t just that you were losing her; you worried she was going to be okay.” She kept saying, “It must have been terrible to say good-bye.”

I said, “Yeah, it must have been.”

“That’s something the reader would want to know. The reader reading that would think, ‘Oh, what was it like to say good-bye?’”

I’d say to the reader, “It must have been terrible to say good-bye. I don’t remember. There’s not a whiff of her perfume in the car that I could 25 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture dredge up.”

In some ways — I don’t say this in the book — but in some ways what you forget that the reader wants to know might say as much about you as what you remember. I think you’re the reader’s only friend and you have to tell the reader your failures. You have to say, “I don’t remember this.”

Or, for instance, the only real schism — nobody in my family ever corrected anything in my book, which was having eaten every meal being told what a moron I was my whole life. It was astonishing to me — my father was dead — that my mother and my sister didn’t correct me.

Except my sister said, “You know you hated” — I hated our mother’s mother, who was dying of cancer and just not very nice. She made my mother cry, so I didn’t like her. And she scared me. She had had her leg amputated, she was scary, she smelled funny, just a lot of things. My sister really liked her, remembers her as this nice old lady who taught her how to crochet and all this stuff.

So I say in the book, sort of parenthetically, “my sister would want me to tell you that my grandmother was really a nice old lady.” I add, “But my sister also voted twice for Ronald Reagan,” close parentheses.

So I feel obligated to mention in passing something that is counter to my representation. I do not feel obligated, as an historian would feel obligated, to represent her point of view at all. That’s what I mean when I say it’s not an act of history, it’s an act of memory. I’m writing about my character. How I remembered her is how she was for me. It has nothing to do in some sense with her historical person.

So again, I just think anything — I’m writing now about two boys I lived with in college out of wedlock, who were perfectly nice boys that I just don’t remember anything about. There’s something wrong with a person who lives with you who doesn’t remember anything about you. Again, to some extent — it’s a very short chapter — but to some extent that fact is something I just have to tell the reader, because otherwise they’ll be asking, “Why isn’t she writing about this?”

Yes, ma’am?

QUESTION: Before, when you said that you might be discussing or writing about being abused, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to then go into “but this person who did it to me” — to take that person’s side as well. And you just actually addressed it a little bit here. I forget who it was who said that when the whole PC thing came, it just killed writing for several years. But now I’m a little confused, because when you said this about, “Well, then, do you take into consideration where this person has 26 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

been,” and then do you go back and forth to sort of even the playing field so that everything comes out nice–nice?”

MARY KARR: No, I don’t think the goal is to have everything come out nice-nice. I think the goal for me is trying to write this book as a novel.

It must have been twenty-one years ago I was pregnant and in this writing group at Harvard, which had Seamus Heaney in it and all these big-deal writers; Sven Birkerts, who’s now a very big-deal critic. I remember bringing in this novel, which was horrible. I think I brought in like five or six chapters.

There is a scene that’s actually in Liars’ Club, where it’s my birthday and my mother has made me a lasagna, which is what I wanted for my birthday. That was back when people didn’t have lasagna, by the way, in small-town America. Then she and my father had a fight and she chucked it at my father as he walks out. He was going out the door to work, and she takes and just launches it, and it lands on the patio and splits and is broken.

I remember Sven Birkerts saying to me, “Your mother just seems like a horrible person.”

I said, “That’s awful, because I don’t feel that way about her.”

He said, “Well, God, she threw your lasagna.”

I said, “Yeah, but she went out and cleaned it up and she said she was sorry.”

He said, “You need to put that in.”

And it’s true. So that’s what I mean when I say the events aren’t about making the person look like the biggest asshole you can make them look like in order for you to look more morally righteous. The goal is to tell what you know about that person.

I mean later in the book there’s a big, dark secret in my mother’s life that’s revealed when I’m in my twenties that really changed a lot of the ways I thought about her. I began to see her more as a “poor thing” than as somebody who had all this power and had been so tyrannical in our lives. So that’s all. I’m just saying that the complication about sharing DNA with each other is not that we disappoint each other. Anybody you love will disappoint you. You know, they’re human. They will eventually disappoint you horribly. It doesn’t matter how sane or how hard they try or how much they love you. There will be some horrible, sad thing. They’ll pour your goldfish down the toilet or something — I don’t know. You will 27 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

incorporate that disappointment into all these other facts about them.

So even if you had a parent who beat the shit out of you every day and was terrible and did all these awful things, that person fed you, took you to school. The complication is the truth is in the complexity of the feeling. It’s not that you’re trying to make them look like these lovely, great people, but the truth is of your experience. If you’re five years old, you still think your mother is the prettiest mother at kindergarten. It doesn’t matter how she behaves. So if you’re going to represent that experience to the reader, again it’s a question of point of view.

QUESTION: That brings me to the second half, which is what you were just saying in response to this man’s question over here. How do you actually access these memories? Maybe the ones that are major, like the butcher knife, those aren’t hard to access. But the ones that are most subtle, perhaps like this book that you’re working on now with these two guys, like Tobias Wolff, who did a historical sort of undertaking, it’s very different, because it then sort of clicks off other memories. But if you are doing it just from your own memories, how do you dredge them up?

MARY KARR: There are a couple things.

One is something I tell people who want to write memories all the time: If you have a bad memory, don’t write a memoir.

I have a famously good memory. My short-term memory — I couldn’t tell you where my apartment is on 38th Street from this building — I have a bad short-term memory. But my long-term memory is pretty extraordinary actually, extraordinarily good.

I have recently had all kinds of complicated medical tests. Every time I have a medical test, one of the things they notice about me — they always say, “Have you been like running a marathon?” — because my adrenal system, my cortisone level, my stress hormones, are always so high. It’s possible, the doctor at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital just explained to me, that the nature of that memory has to do with my adrenal system. Now, it’s also possible, as I tell people, “Of course I don’t remember all this; I just bullshit myself that I do,” and I keep waiting for somebody to come out and say, “No, you didn’t remember it.”

But I liken it to if you go back to a reunion — you ever go back to your grade school, your high school? — you look at these middle-aged people and you say, “Who are these people? I went to school with these good- looking teen-agers.”

And then, somebody comes up and says, “I sat next to you in Miss Pickett’s class,” and all of a sudden I look at her and I can see her twelve-year-old 28 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture face, and I remember Miss Pickett’s class, I remember where she sat, because the boy I had a crush on sat at the back of the row, the very back of the row, and after that class his locker was this way, and I got out and I went that way because that was the speech class, and that was the last class of the day I remembered, because then I walked across the football field and watched him practice football.

So all of that stuff I would not have said I remembered. I did not remember, but that one thing kind of unpacked. We all have those memories. It’s not like a computer file. It’s not pure, obviously.

Yes, sir?

QUESTION: This is actually a survey question. You don’t have to be truthful. Which truth do you prefer, the truth of the process of recording these facts and memories, our truth of how we perceive you by reading or listening, or the truth of what you believe to be the facts of your memoirs?

MARY KARR: Well, the truth that I believe are the facts of my memoirs. The actual events I try to put into a form that will make you experience the truth that I experienced. Now, I believe we remember through a filter of self, and so, ergo, the self I was when I wrote The Liars’ Club thirteen years ago is different — it’s more Catholic, among other things; it earns more money; it has a lot of other things going on. So I agree with you that there is a different self.

QUESTION: Which do you prefer?

MARY KARR: I mean I’m making a work of art, a representation, and my goal is to make you, the reader, experience, have a feeling. You put the penny of your imagination — as the poet Philip Larkin once said, the penny of your attention — into a page, and you pull the handle, and you get out a feeling. So that’s a representation.

That said, the events of the book are the same. They don’t differ.

Somebody once said to me, “You expect me to believe that you went up in the attic of your house and found this trunk that had your grandmother’s leg in it, a prosthetic leg?”

I said, “Do you think I could make that up?” At that time, my mother still lived in the house I grew up in. I said, “Shit, you can go down there and look. Call her up. I’ll give you her phone number. You go look. My guess is it’s still exactly where it was thirty years ago.”

So, you know, you can nickel and dime me with this stuff all day, but I’m still going to out-earn you. 29 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

Yes, ma’am?

QUESTION: Regarding truth and complexity — and this is sort of what you just said — as a Catholic, how do you handle — like you profess your faith in the Creed — how do you handle the things that Catholics are challenged on by non-Catholics, the Virgin birth or —

MARY KARR: People tell me I’m a moron?

QUESTIONER: Yes. I mean the actual things that you may not — do you respond as a poet? Do you respond —

MARY KARR: I don’t know what you mean. Like tell me what.

QUESTION: Well, take the Virgin birth, the things that Catholics profess, some of the things.

MARY KARR: Birth at all is such a miracle to me, the fact of whether there was a Virgin birth or not that could happen is just like bizarre. The fact that we’re born at all is such a miracle that you would think that that couldn’t happen?

I mean the amazing thing to me about my secular friends, my friends who are not believers — I have a girlfriend who gave me such grief when I became a Catholic. God, did she nag me. She’s my son’s godmother.

Richard Ford wrote me a postcard that said: “Not you on the Pope’s team. Say it ain’t so. You’ve been talking to Toby Wolff” — who’s also a Catholic, who’s also my godfather by the way.

But anyway, I, like my mother, don’t really give a big rat’s ass. A lot of it is that.

QUESTION: About what people think or about what you’re professing to?

MARY KARR: I mean about the Virgin birth, I just feel like the Catholics didn’t elect me spokesperson for the day. I just say, “I believe.”

Oh, I was going to talk about my girlfriend. I’m sorry. This is post- menopausal mind. I said to my girlfriend, “You think your ex-husband makes your wind chimes ring when you’re in a bad mood, but you don’t believe in the damned Virgin birth? What is your source of information that your husband makes the wind chimes ring? You want to believe that. Now, I actually have better sources, historically speaking, of information. There are a lot of other people as dumb as I am who believe this.” 30 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

I see this sixth sense and all these things — you know, people are so desperate to believe something. As soon as you believe something that has no rational explanation — as soon as you believe in, say, extrasensory perception or anything like that, any evidence of any spiritual activity at all — all of it is permissible. You have crossed the line.

I also say to people, “I don’t know why that would bother you that they tell you that. They just tell me I’m an idiot, or I assume they think I’m an idiot.”

QUESTION: I guess I was just curious — and maybe there is no answer — I was sort of curious, as a memoirist and a poet, because as poets you’re working with metaphor and you’re working with truth.

MARY KARR: It’s not metaphor. My belief is not metaphorical, by the way. I believe in the resurrection. None of that is metaphorical for me. Is that what you mean?

QUESTION: Yes. I was curious if you —

MARY KARR: If I’m a “cafeteria Catholic?” Absolutely.

QUESTION: — if there are certain things that you respond to as a memoirist maybe and certain things as a poet, because poetry is truth and metaphor?

MARY KARR: I probably wouldn’t read the Bible as literally as Billy Graham would, would be my guess.

VOICE: Neither does he.

MARY KARR: Yes, neither does he, that’s right. But none of that is metaphorical for me. I have a lot of trouble with the Church hierarchy, but it turns out I’m not the only person who feels that way. I’m still a win for Baby Jesus. I’m still a win. I am still better than I would be without him.

There was somebody over there.

QUESTION: I’m in a little bit of a quandary, having difficulty discerning between truth and reality. I am in the process of writing a story that has to do with my life, but I see it more as there are fictionalized aspects to this memoir.

MARY KARR: Well, then it’s not memoir.

QUESTION: It’s a novel? 31 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

MARY KARR: Yes.

QUESTION: But I want to call that person by my own name.

MARY KARR: Knock yourself out. Philip Roth does it all the time. I mean Philip Roth has a novel where “Philip Roth” is married to an actress who’s probably Claire — you know.

QUESTION: Yes, I do. But I also wonder, in terms of fictionalization and truth versus reality —

MARY KARR: So what are you talking about fictionalizing? I change names. I make up the name of the town I’m in to protect just innocent bystanders. The boy who raped me I disguised so that no one else in my neighborhood would have any — my fear was that someone who was not guilty of that everybody would think, “Oh, it was So-and-So in my neighborhood” — so I gave him braces, which nobody in my neighborhood could have afforded. Other than that, choosing to write about this rather than that — you know.

QUESTION: Well, say, for example, if we agree that truth is sort of multifaceted—well what about psychological truth or spiritual truth?

MARY KARR: Absolutely.

QUESTION: If you believe in the resurrection, I can say empirically there’s no evidence for that. So, in fact —

MARY KARR: Well, some people would disagree. But it doesn’t matter whether there’s empirical evidence. It’s an act of faith anyway.

QUESTION: Right. But that, in fact, is not what I would call reality, because it can’t be proven in an empirical or scientific way.

MARY KARR: My reality, honest to God — I know I sound nuts; it’s okay, though — is I feel like the Holy Spirit tells me what to do. I know that sounds nuts. That’s how I feel. I never get a long-term plan, I never get a five-year plan, but I feel like I’m guided by something in prayer that is greater than me and smarter than me.

I turned down a million dollars for the book I’m writing now five years ago. I turned it down based on prayer. My agent said, “That’s a lot of money.” I said, “If it’s my money, I’ll wind up getting it anyway; and if it’s not, I don’t want it.”

QUESTION: And I think that’s my point exactly, because for you that is 32 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture the spiritual truth.

MARY KARR: Right.

QUESTION: And that is every bit as much a truth as what someone else, a secular perspective —

MARY KARR: You still haven’t told me what you’re making up. You’re hemming and hawing.

QUESTION: Because I also have a problem, because I think of what Calderone said, “La vida es sueno” [life is a dream]. So there are aspects of the memory of my childhood which I’m not clear about how to discern.

MARY KARR: How do you mean?

QUESTION: Well, I’m not sure if they actually occurred in dream time or if they actually occurred in reality, in sort of a measurable or documented, historical context.

MARY KARR: I see. So do they relate to a trauma or to somebody else’s character?

QUESTION: They’re more trauma-related, but there is also a fantastic element, a sort of magical realistic aspect. But why must the genre be either novel or memoir?

MARY KARR: I just think you tell the reader “I don’t know if I dreamed this or it was true.”

QUESTION: Right.

MARY KARR: This is not that damned hard. I mean you read Maxine Hong Kingston, and she’s writing these fantastic stories where ghosts are talking to her, and you know that this is part of Chinese mythology and the stories in her family and she gives it a cultural context, and you don’t think there were ghosts talking to her. You just tell the reader, just level with the reader. Don’t say Baby Jesus is talking to you if he’s not.

QUESTION: So I don’t need to put a disqualifier or do what Mary McCarthy did, which was explicate?

MARY KARR: I would just level with the reader: “I don’t know if this came to me in a dream or if it was a fact.”

QUESTION: Right. Okay. Thank you.

33 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: I think we have time for one more question.

MARY KARR: I’m going to do two more because I feel sorry for the women who have had their hands up so long.

QUESTION: Because I suspect there may be a laugh or two, can we hear about your experience at the White House, or do we have to wait until you write about it?

MARY KARR: You know, it was very benign. I know Mrs. Bush, because when Liars’ Club first came out I did a lot of fund-raising for literacy in the state of Texas, when President Bush was still governor, and she has done a lot of stuff for literacy and for libraries in the state of Texas. She did a big book festival that I started doing with Larry McMurtry back ten or twelve years ago.

So I went to the White House. I actually would not have gone unless I could have brought my son, just because for your kid to get to look around the White House seemed cool, like a field trip. It was really kind of uneventful.

Oh, you know what was really cool was the guy who does the voice of Elmo on “Sesame Street” was there. Have y’all ever seen this guy? He was so cool. So I spent my whole time talking to Elmo.

Then my son and I had our picture taken with Mrs. Bush. Then I read a poem, a couple of poems that were offensive. Then I went home. So never to be invited back, I’m sure.

Yes, ma’am?

QUESTION: You’re so authentic in your books and I just love seeing your personality.

MARY KARR: I love seeing my personality too.

QUESTION: Oh, it’s cute.

MARY KARR: Everybody is authentic if you talk to them.

QUESTION: Well, you are. But I want to get back to James Frey’s book and the truth. The way I read it — I read it three times — is because in our family we were told to. My nephew, an MBA, became a crack addict, and they said, “Read this.” A blues singer in Memphis introduced him to crack and he’s still on it.

MARY KARR: So sorry. 34 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

QUESTION: But the book is a liar’s book. If you’ve ever known anyone on crack, they lie. In this book you expect that. This teaches you about lying. Did you get that at all in the book? That’s all I could think of when I read the Frey book. The thing that bothered me was this: Why wouldn’t he? He was a crack addict.

MARY KARR: Well, you know, I’m a drug addict. I mean he was allegedly not drinking and doing drugs. My fear was that it seemed a little irresponsible. He later said, I guess, that he did go to AA meetings or something. But initially his press release said: “James Frey is no fan of Twelve-Step programs and he’s gotten tough the way Clint Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’ got the bad guys to back down.”

QUESTION: He said it was true, but it was his truth, not a lie.

MARY KARR: He said it was his truth. Well, again, it’s like this guy is talking about fictionalizing something. That seems completely legitimate to me. You’re talking about revealing a fantasy or a made-up thing to a reader.

I mean this guy said that this woman killed herself because he got sent away to jail. Only it turns out he didn’t get sent away to jail, he just left her. And she did kill herself, but it might not have had anything to do with him — or it might have. But he made this narrative up in which the actions of other people were just shit happened that didn’t happen.

QUESTION: But this was required reading for us anyway.

MARY KARR: It was required reading for your family? Go to a better rehab next time. Send them somewhere where they really get people sober.

QUESTION: The rehab said, “Read it because they lie. This will teach you about they lie.”

MARY KARR: Oh, this will teach you about lying.

QUESTION: About lying, that they tell lies.

MARY KARR: Well, when Time Magazine calls me again about this, I’m going to give them your number.

This woman has had her hand up too long.

BRENNAN O’DONNELL: Sure, one last question.

35 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

QUESTION: First of all, I’m a writer but I’m also a therapist. You know, there is a difference between conscious lying, which is what I think he did, and people who kind of don’t remember the truth, or it’s something that happened to them once and they remember it, they experience it, as it always happened. Any of us who interview or see enough people know that. So I think I’m really speaking a little bit in defense of some memoir writers who are not consciously lying. This is what they really remember, even if it’s false.

MARY KARR: Right, I think that’s true.

The truth is I think, in fairness to his publisher, most of the — I mean he said “nobody’s book is as scrutinized as mine has been” — I think everybody’s is when you’re writing it, as you’re writing it.

Just one thing I want to mention. I wrote a scene in Cherry about saying good-bye to my father, with whom I had been very close as a child. When I started to write the scene, I remembered the day that I said good-bye to him. I remembered that my father had sort of left me when I became an adolescent and that he was not available to me.

When I started trying to think of evidence for this, there wasn’t any. I remembered I had a job. He would come every day and bring me little supper plates with foil over them. I remember getting a ride. I never asked him to take me anywhere. There was never a day when he wasn’t there. He was never late.

I left him. I remembered that sound bite in a very convenient way. But as soon as I began to actually think about my life, again trying to come up with the actual events, I realized that this was just bullshit that I’d been telling myself all these years about my father.

I always tell people: If you’re going to write a memoir, you can’t be the kind of person who doesn’t apologize. You have to be the kind of person who asks yourself something and have to ask yourself over and over and over again, “Is that true? Is that really true? Was it really like it? Was it really like that every day?” “No, she wasn’t like that every day. Some days she was like this.”

So, hopefully, you’re interested in depth, in the depth of experience, not just the surface of it. If you’re interested in the surface of it, write a screenplay.

PETER STEINFELS: One final announcement before we conclude.

On Tuesday, May 22nd, this amphitheater will be the site of another event organized by the Center. It will be entitled “A Movie and a Meditation: 36 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

The Eye of Matisse, the Mystery of God.” The evening will begin with an account by Patricia Hampl, poet and memoirist, and we know a friend of Mary Karr’s from days past in Minnesota. It will be her account of how a literary and spiritual pilgrimage inspired by a Matisse painting led her to the chapel that the legendary artist designed for a convent of Dominican sisters in Vence, France.

The second course of that evening will be the delightful documentary movie, “A Model for Matisse,” the story of how Matisse was inspired by his friendship with Sister Jacques-Marie, his former nurse and then model, to create this final masterpiece for the convent that she had joined.

Then, Barbara Freed, a filmmaker as well as a professor of French, will join Patricia Hampl in a conversation about Sister Jacques-Marie, about the chapel, Matisse’s art, and the whole web of divine and human friendship that entwined them.

More information about that event and about all the Center’s activities is on our Web site.

And now, to conclude this evening, let’s express once again our thanks to Mary Karr and Brennan O’Donnell.