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Yesterday, bitterly cold from all the bitter cold, I stopped briefly at the Thirtieth Street Station bookstore while en route to my first day at Penn. There I was greeted with a tower of books featuring Ted Koppel, Chelsea Clinton, and me (Love). Everyday, ordinary company? For me, not really.

Later, at the Penn Bookstore, I was searching for something else when I discovered all these Handling the Truth's (Handlings of Truth?) beside Mary Karr's much-publicized The Art of Memoir (about which I'd had so many (politely stated) concerns).

Last week I heard from a kind soul who had found Going Over at a train station in Germany.

My point being: We write and then we let our words and stories go. We can't do a whole lot about what happens after that, except to be happily surprised when we're discovered (or when we discover ourselves).

Speaking of books, submissions have now closed for the This Is the Story of You giveaway. I'll have some news about that later today.

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The author of several bestselling memoirs gives us a look under the hood. What makes a successful memoir? How does one handle the wily beast of memory? Karr elegantly dissects several well-known memoirs and gives clear examples of why they work so well. She also discusses her own work and writing process. Books mentioned in [...]

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This morning, on HuffPo, I'm reflecting on why structure actually does matter in memoir — how indeed it helps to define the form—to distinguish it from autobiography, essay, war reporting, journalism, because that distinction matters. I refer in the piece to some of my favorite memoirs and memoirists, though there are, of course, many more.

And, because I must, I remember my brilliant students at Penn, and one particular Spectacular.

The full link is here.

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Editor's note: It's been 20 years since the groundbreaking memoir The Liars' Club sent Mary Karr into the literary spotlight with its phenomenal success and widespread acclaim. Since then, Karr has gone on to publish two more bestselling memoirs — Cherry and Lit — and has mentored such revered authors as Cheryl Strayed and Koren [...]

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Two years ago, the students in my memoir class at Penn were encouraged to read Mary Karr's The Liars' Club—one of those rare chronologically-told life stories that transcends autobiography to become real-live-brimming-with-wisdom memoir. You can't get much more vivid than Karr does with that Club. (I'm also a fan of Lit; both books are featured in Handling the Truth.) And oh, what discussions her words and stories prompt.

I was delighted when the Chicago Tribune invited me to review Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir. The book, which is full of unexpected riffs on a wide range of topics, is especially helpful to those who may be interested in how Karr made, then contemplated, her three life stories. She reports on the writing process, the vetting process, the after glow, and her right to change her mind in subsequent books on the story she lived.

My Tribune review begins like this, below,

When we write about the writing of memoir, we are stuck, up front, with the lexicographer's dilemma: How do we define the word? Is memoir, for example, an autobiographical poem? Is it essay, "new journalism," fiction that feels true, ghost stories, an A-to-Z recounting of me? Is it narcissism, and if it is narcissism, what finally redeems it? Memoir can take many forms. But what, in essence, is it?

In her new book, "The Art of Memoir," Mary Karr — beloved memoirist and Peck professor of literature at Syracuse University — finds herself foiled in her quest for a "Unified Field Theory" for the category. The "first-person coming-of-age story, putatively true" gave the child Karr hope, she writes. Don DeLillo's thought that "a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them" reinforces, for Karr, that "memoir purports to grow more organically from lived experience." A lifetime of reading and writing memoir has persuaded Karr that it is "an art, a made thing." Memoir, for Karr, is many things. Above all else, she suggests, it is a democratic telling open to anyone who has lived.

and can now be found in full here.

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I had time, just now, that quiet time, of reading the magazines that came in last week.  Oh, the stolen deliciousness of it all.  In The New Yorker, I read of Oliver Sacks on his years dedicated, in large part, to experimenting with large doses of amphetamines, morning-glory seeds, LSD, morphine, and all other manner of neuro-shifters.  I thought of all the Sacks I have read these many years, of the seeming innocence of his beguiling childhood memoir, Uncle Tungsten:  Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, of his great empathy for patients and ferns and other earthly beings. His New Yorker essay delves, skips, and buries time before it rushes, headlong, toward its hard stop.  Sacks had discovered a book on migraines and it had become important to him.  He had a revelation about migraines.  He ...

... had a sense of resolution, too, that I was indeed equipped to write a Liveing-like book, that perhaps I could be the Liveing of our time.

The next day, before I returned Liveing's book to the library, I photocopied the whole thing, and then, bit by bit, I started to write my own book.  The joy I got from doing this was real—infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphetamines—and I never took amphetamines again.

Writing books, Sacks suggests, saved him.  The next story I read, an excerpt from D.T. Max's much heralded biography of David Foster Wallace (in Newsweek), suggests how writing would and would not save this genius.  The excerpt, which focuses on Wallace's early correspondence with Jonathan Franzen as well as his infatuation with Mary Karr, suggests that this book is well worth reading as a whole.  I've always been a huge D.T. Max fan, and I'm certain I will learn from these pages.

In between the Sacks and the Wallace, I found two poems of interest.  Joyce Carol Oates has a chilling, compelling poem in The New Yorker called "Edward Hopper's '11 A.M.,' 1926"�worth reading from beginning to end.  Oates was one of several authors who contributed to one of my favorite poetry collections (a gift from my sister) called The Poetry of Solitude:  A Tribute to Edward Hopper (collected and introduced by Gail Levin). Clearly this project, all these years later, continues to inspire.

Finally, within the pages of this week's New Yorker is a poem by C.K. Williams, one of my favorite living poets.  I had the great pleasure and privilege, years ago, of interviewing C.K. in his Princeton home for a magazine story.  Later, I saw him read at the Writer's House at Penn.  He remains vital, interesting, experimental, and honest, and his new poem, "Haste," is a terrifying portrait of time.  From its later phrases:

No one says Not so fast now not Catherine when I hold her not our dog as I putter behind her
yet everything past present future rushes so quickly through me I've frayed like a flag

Unbuckle your spurs life don't you know up ahead where the road ends there's an abyss? ... 

My first corporate interview isn't until 1 this afternoon.  I'm sitting down to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.  I figure it's time.


(That above, by the way, is my cat Colors, who lived with me for many years.  She's climbing into my bedroom window.  I'm eleven or twelve years old.  And I'm reading on my bed as she pokes her pink nose in.)

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First published in 1995, The Liar's Club was nothing short of a ricochet memoir—an event of a book, a story told with such lacerating equanimity and devastating particularity that anyone who knew memoir, loved memoir, celebrated memoir had soon made the book their own.

Except for me.  I chose to wait.  I knew, instinctively, that if I read this book too soon I might not have room to define the memoir form for myself, to make my own books in my own virginal book-making way.  I had to glance away before I could glance toward.

Over these past three days, I have done little but read, admire, and privately exclaim over The Liar's Club.  Mary Karr grows up living the hardest possible scrabble of a life, in a poisonous town, with a Nervous mother, with a daddy who excels at big, foggy stories among menfolk at The Liar's Club, with a grandmother's whose dying from cancer is an unrelieved grotesquerie, and whose fake leg with its fake shoe terrifies a child who is herself ornery as anything, except when nobody's looking. Karr knows when to use the past tense and when to wing at us with the present.  She understands that in a story this full of snakes and madness, accidents and fires, the crawl of sugar ants up the arm of a dying woman, she will only gain our trust by saying, sometimes, that maybe her memory has been fudged, or maybe her sister recalls it better, or maybe she'll just have to leave that part blank because her thoughts went blank at that particularly crucial moment.  People write about The Liar's Club, and they write about its funniness, its love, and that's quite a trick, if you ask me.  It's quite a trick to look back on what Mary Karr looks back on—poverty, abuse, hurting of every measure, danger—and come up with a story written not to tattle on what was done, not to complain, not to suggest that the author had it hard up, See?, but to try to understand what breed of sadness, heartache, or shatter might lie at the bottom of her mother's supreme but never evil oddness.

And look.  Of course I'm a sucker for gorgeous prose.  It's there, on every page.

That morning, when I woke up lying under the back slant of the windshield, the world smelled not unlike a wicked fart in a close room.  I opened my eyes.  In the fields of gator grass, you could see the ghostly outline of oil rigs bucking in slow motion.  They always reminded me of rodeo riders, or of some huge servant creatures rising up and bowing down to nothing in particular.  In the distance, giant towers rose from each refinery, with flames that turned every night's sky an odd, acid-green color.  The first time I saw a glow-in-the-dark rosary, it reminded me of those five-story torches that circled the town at night.  Then there were the white oil-storage tanks, miles of them, like the abandoned eggs of some terrible prehistoric insect.

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HBO has approved a “half-hour comedy project” based on Karen Russell‘s critically acclaimed novel,  Swamplandia. Producer Scott Rudin will lead the project.

Follow this link to read a free excerpt from Swamplandia. The debut novel focused on a teenaged alligator wrestler who takes a surreal journey through the Florida Everglades.

The Hollywood Reporter also revealed details about other literary projects at HBO: “A search is under way for a writer on the project, with Rudin attached to executive produce the comedy and author Russell consulting … In addition, Rudin is attached to Noah Baumbach‘s adaptation of Jonathan Frazen‘s The Corrections and Cynthia Mort‘s half-hour comedy based on scribe Mary Karr‘s life.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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I'm not quite sure who this lovely lady is—Dionysus, I'm guessing—but I found her standing tall within a Philadelphia street festival, utterly and peaceably alone above the crowds (she was stilts-assisted). I return to her on this rainy morning because I feel her mood. Because I have looked out upon my pile of unread books and determined my short-term future.

Having just left Cleopatra (Stacy Schiff) in her tragic, epic Alexandria, I turn toward next titles. Some of them I've read before and will be re-reading. Some are brand-new both to the world and to me. Some are written by friends or friends of friends, one by a Pulitzer Prize winner who once surprised me with a glorious response to my Chicago Tribune review of her March, some by people I doubt I'll ever meet; two were gifts. I feel decadent, to be honest, to have found this time to read. But I have it; I'm claiming it; it will be forever mine.

My au courant (can I use that term this way?) book list, then:

Sweet Dreams, DeWitt Henry
When We Danced on Water, Evan Fallenberg (a Kindle book—about dance! about Berlin! Becca recommended!)
Dreamland Social Club, Tara Altebrando
Caleb's Crossing, Geraldine Brooks
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
The Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd
Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf
The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
Touchy Subjects, Emma Donoghue
The Blue Flower of Forgetfulness, Cyrus Samii
The Boneshaker, Kate Milford

Stay tuned for my responses.

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I've titled this post "Lit: A Review," but on this blog, I don't write reviews; I save that voice for the Chicago Tribune. Here I write about a book's impact, about where I was and how I felt when I read it.

I read Lit while lying on the slender black couch where I spend most sleepless nights. I read it pulled up under the blue blanket that snuffs the perpetual winter chill. I read it in three sittings and would have been happy with just one, but life (my life) got in the way. I heard voices in my head: This is an artist working. This is a woman resurrected. This is a mother who genuinely loves. This is a poet-teacher who, within the pages of Lit, is teaching us how a book like this gets made. There are so many extraordinarily fine sentences in Lit. There are fragments torn from Heather McHugh, Terrence Hayes, and Don DiLillo; words of advice from Tobias Wolf; stories about good-hearted addicts; revelations of a gorgeous sisterhood. There is a lot of soul searching, a lot of desperate need, no small share of triumph, and—this is, perhaps, the biggest thing—no accusatory fingers pointed. Mary Karr has lived one hell of a life. There would be blame enough to go around, but no one gets blamed in Lit, which is to say that no one emerges as caricature.

Last Monday, in Room 209 of the Kelly Writers House, J.—in endless pursuit of a deeper knowing—asked if I'd heard the Mary Karr interview, if I'd read any of the book's excerpts on-line. I said that when I got home that day, Lit would be waiting for me on the doorstep. J.—no romantic—actually sighed. "You're so lucky," he said, and J., I am. But we're all lucky, as a matter of fact, that books like these get written.

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I said I wanted to read a good book, a very good book. I picked up Lit, by Mary Karr. I picked up Lit, and suddenly I wanted my son to have a copy, my students, my friends. In the middle of all my reading and wanting, my friend Kate Moses called, and I said, Lit. Lit. Lit., and she said, Did you get to the part about the wedding yet? and I said, I don't want this book to end. Sometimes I think I've fallen out of love with books. And then comes Lit, and I'm impassioned once again.

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This evening I chased the moon, a fine, swollen creature.

Earlier in the day I read Kathryn Stockett's The Help, which I wanted to like so much more than I did. I am addicted to nuance and to language as a reader; that is all I will say. Later on in the day, reading the opening chapters of Mary Karr's Lit, I felt my readerly self settling in.

Then came the moon.

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