Post #37 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
Reviewed by Tracy Kauffman Wood
The poet Mary Karr admittedly wrote The Liars’ Club for the money. She needed money for a car when she lived as a single mom in Syracuse, New York. Memoir writers will be delighted to hear that there is money in memoir.
Well, there is if you can write like Mary Karr.
This was Karr’s first memoir, selected as one of the best books of 1995 by People, Time, The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly. It also won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the best first nonfiction. She followed this with a second memoir, Cherry
In the very beginning of The Liars’ Club, we are transported to a moment and her mood on the East Texas front stoop where as a seven year old she sits awaiting her fate, to be decided by the family doctor, the town sheriff and the congregating neighbor women. Her father is working the graveyard shift at the oil plant while her mother is being taken “Away” for being “Nervous.” The sheriff approaches the neighbor women “… setting in motion a series of robe-tightenings and sweater buttonings.” “The concrete was cold on my bottom through the thin nightgown. I plucked two june bugs off the screen and tried to line them up to race down a brick, but one flew off, and the other just flipped over and waggled its legs in the air.”
I’m struck by her ability to move seamlessly from a moment in the past to her perspective about it in the present. This she says a few paragraphs later, “When the truth would be unbearable, the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness.”
In fact, Mary Karr is a heroic memoirist to many readers with the audacity and power to “reach out of the page and grab ahold” of a particular demon from her past and force him to remember what she will never forget. “I say this now across the decades and thousands of miles solely to remind you of the long memory my daddy always said I had.
Memoirists have long memories. But the trick is to flag the memories that shine a light toward universal truths. Here is how Mary Karr describes the process. “Nonetheless, truth was conspiring to assemble itself before me. Call it fate or grace or pure shithouse chance. I was being guided somehow into the chute that led down the dark corridor at the end of which truth’s door would fly open.”
In Mary Karr’s case, it’s not through “fate or grace or pure shithouse chance” that we experience the misery and hilarity of her unconventional, universal childhood. It’s her precision with words, derived with gratitude from her mother’s books and her father’s stories, which sets us up for it.
Tracy Kauffman Wood is a professional photographer and is currently writing a memoir. You can follow her at: http://www.whocanstopadream.blogspot.com/
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