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Be yourself when you write, author tells W&J students

3 min read
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Being yourself is good advice in life, and it’s good advice in writing, too, according to best-selling memoirist Mary Karr.

“When I first starting writing, I tried to sound like T.S. Eliot,” the 61-year-old Karr recalled. “The minute I started writing and thinking like someone from East Texas, my work began to find itself.”

And Karr’s ability to speak in her own distinctive voice has paid big dividends. A professor of English literature at Syracuse University, her books have turned up on many a nightstand in the last couple of decades. Her debut memoir, 1995’s “The Liar’s Club,” recounts her rocky childhood in a deeply dysfunctional family, and ended up on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. It was followed by two more slices of Karr’s life: “Cherry,” in 2000, which took her story into adolescence; and “Lit: A Memoir,” which details how she overcame alcoholism and converted to Catholicism.

Karr was at Dieter-Porter Life Sciences Building on the Washington & Jefferson College campus Wednesday night for an appearance as part of the college’s J. Robert Maxwell Lecture Series. Karr was in residence at W&J for much of the week, talking to classes and hosting a workshop on substance abuse.

Karr outlined her own unlikely path to literary stardom, recounting her turbulent upbringing (“Everyone drank really hard, and because it was Texas, everyone was armed”), how she battled with depression until she was about 35 years old, and how, before “The Liar’s Club” was published, she had to ferry her son around on public transportation because she couldn’t afford a car. And then, the process of writing “The Liar’s Club” was no stroll in the park either, since it took nine months for her to find her own storytelling voice, and then she had to summon traumatic memories.

“A memoir, if it’s done right, is like knocking yourself out with your own fist,” Karr explained. “It comes to a moment where it’s extremely painful.”

When she was 10, Karr recalled, she decided she wanted to be a poet and write a memoir, an unusual goal to have in mid-1960s Texas, since autobiographies were something typically offered up by “film stars and prime ministers.” She’s also fulfilled her childhood wish to be a poet, having been a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2005 and winning a Whiting Award for poetry in 1989.

Reading Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was a revelation for her, Karr said, and “the beginning of empathy for me. I learned that other people were suffering.”

When asked which of her books was her favorite, Karr said she didn’t really have one, putting more of her focus and energy into reading works by other writers.

“I’m just not that interested in my own writing,” she said.

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