Nov 09 2009
Mary Karr on the Personal Connection of Memoirs
I just read this PW interview with Mary Karr, author of Lit, was published November 3, and really enjoyed it. She’s got some great insight on literature in general, and I was surprised (and pleased) at her mention of prayer. I know nothing at all about Lit or Ms. Karr’s other work, but I recommend this interview! Read the whole thing here.
PW: The memoir category has blossomed in recent seasons. What accounts for the popularity of these personal stories?
MK: The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold. My two favorite novelists today are probably DeLillo and Garcia-Marquez. But the cool, allegorical surfaces of lesser postmodern novels—their self-conscious, preening intellectualism, which is as self-indulgent to me as the most whining memoirist, by the way—these trends result in cartoonish or self-consciously grotesque and/or despicable characters. Wallace Stevens wrote, “People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.”
