Quotes from Mary Karr

Bent Bender "Well, if God doesn't exist, who's laughing at us?" —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov One day Lecia rings me up. Tawdry, she says. An adjective meaning crude or trashy or otherwise unseemly, I say. Talk to me. Mother's sleeping with Harold, she says, meaning Daddy's pill-popping nurse, crashing of late in the spare room. Never happen, I say. That man has got to be gay. Happened, she says.

For all of memory's power to yank us back into an overwhelming past, it can also fail big time—both short-term (the lost vehicle in a parking lot, the name at the tip of your tongue) and long-term (we made out in high school?).

Forget how inventing stuff breaks a contract with the reader, it fences the memoirist off from the deeper truths that only surface in draft five or ten or twenty.

But unless you're looking at actual lived experience, the more profound meanings will remain forever shrouded. You'll never unearth the more complex truths, the ones that counter that convenient first take on the past. A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or to pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is. He's missing the personal liberation that comes from the examined life.

But whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: it may continue to tug on you without your being aware of it. And lying about it can—for all but the most hardened sociopath—carve a lonely gap between your disguise and who you really are.

The practiced liar also projects her own manipulative, double-dealing facade onto everyone she meets, which makes moving through the world a wary, anxious enterprise. It's hard enough to see what's going on without forcing yourself to look through the wool you've pulled over your own eyes.

was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I'd

Pollock once paid a fortune for a Picasso drawing, then erased it in order to see how it was made.

It's the disparities in your childhood, your life between ass-whippings, that throws past pain into stark relief for a reader. Without those places of hope, the beatings become too repetitive—maybe they'd make a dramatic read for a while, but single-note tales seldom bear rereading.

It sometimes seems to me like we're not supposed to notice that Shug's colored, or that saying anything about it would be bad manners. That puzzles me because Shug's being colored strikes me as real obvious. And usually anybody's difference gets pounced on and picked at. This silence is a lie peculiar to a man's skin color, which makes it extra serious and extra puzzling. Daddy

What if she's dead?" I said. "She'll stay dead," he said. "She'll still be dead come morning.

The weak spots in our union are there from the git-go—aren't they always? But every difference lures me, for if I can yield to Warren's way of being, his cool certainty can replace my ragtag—intermittently drunken—lurching around.

Somebody touched my foot. Looking down, I found a sandy-haired woman tugging on my boot buckle. Katie Butke, she introduced herself as. Katie was solid as a fireplug and clean as a boiled peanut, affable but unimpressed by the likes of me.

I wouldn't call my pre-Warren drinking out of control because I had control. So long as I didn't leave my apartment, I didn't drink. In Cambridge, that person no longer exists. With an invisible eraser, I'm internally rubbing hard at the core of her, and Warren's steady, unwavering gaze is lasering away her external edges. Soon she'll be mist.

sister was. But I couldn't resist such a clear shot. So I said her

It's distracting the boys, he says. You ponder what can be said that's enough of a fuck you. (The problem with fuck you's in this sort of place is that you habituate them; they lose their potency, and ergo must increase in outrageousness.) Finally you say, What makes you think I'm not wearing a bra, Mr. LeBump?

Others can't stand to revise; instead they decide they're avant-garde, so everybody who doesn't like their work is unenlightened. (Note: being avant-garde is now... well, garde.)

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. —William Matthews, "Mingus at the Showplace

Problem three: Our landlords, the Loud Family. This time, they're after Dev's blue blow-up wading pool. They left a message: If there's a yellow circle in the lawn, our security deposit must cover the cost of sodding.

PART I Escape from the Tropic of Squalor

Problem three: Our landlords, the Loud Family. This time, they're after Dev's blue blow-up wading pool. They left a message: If there's a yellow circle in the lawn, our security deposit must cover the cost of sodding. Sod off, I said to the answering machine, shooting it the finger, both barrels, underhanded, like pistolas from a holster. Double-dog damn them.

Any nod on serious hallucinogens can become sagelike, and suddenly the group resembles some Bedouin tribe weary with ancient desert wisdom looking down on the scorpion-stung interloper whose tongue is slowly swelling his throat shut.

We called him Quinn the Eskimo, since he'd just moved to Leechfield from the Alaskan oil fields where his daddy had worked. Blond as Jean Harlow, pimply, he was also skinny enough to crash a junior high dance. His sole source of pride was the obvious lie that his old man had invented the water bed, then tragically had his patent pinched by some California engineer.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every