Mary Karr
Mary Karr
Mary Karris an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth16 January 1955
CountryUnited States of America
ability artistic cannot compete economy experience full period poetry prose short time
Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.
god permits willing
The thing I have to do as a writer, and that God permits me to do, is that I have to be willing to fail.
alone arrogant charge hard major understand
I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and I'm just an arrogant little thing. It's hard for me to admit that I can't understand something, let alone not be in charge of it.
people
Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about them.
information music poetry prose
Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.
hours kid piece raise six work
On a piece of prose, you have to work at least six hours a day. I don't know how you can do that and teach and raise a kid and paint the house.
addictive buy coke counting diet god last people
I have a completely addictive personality. Diet Coke is my last - God, I know people counting days off Diet Coke; I'm such a Diet Cokehead. Now I won't let myself buy it.
god
There are all kinds of things God wants me to do that I'm very obstreperous about.
audience great head rca secular
Writing about prayer to a secular audience is tap-dancing on the radio. I want to say, 'Gee whiz, isn't this great,' and have everyone's head cocked like the RCA dog.
tv
I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.
based blot certain mistakenly trying vein writers
Young writers often mistakenly choose a certain vein or style based on who they want to be, unconsciously trying to blot out who they actually are. You want to escape yourself.
affected huge money success writers
Success has affected my self-definition in that I have more money. Writers pooh-pooh that idea, but it's a huge deal.
classes critical elements life memoirs might since teaching
I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it.
antiquated exalted less tortured
I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I've been that way, I've always been less exalted than I would have liked.