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
book healthy age
Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.
dad guy way
Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.
husband wall lying
If you lie to your husband - even about something so banal as how much you drink - each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it's deflected away.
thinking voice listening
But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me... and go on living without me.
order years clothes
I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.
football boys play
It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy--getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff--get undercut by having to play football.
character fighting water
The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
art ideas people
People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I'll never see it again.
smart school students
The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard.
character emotional giving
The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
keys car credit
How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.
games pool geometry
A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
memories literature memoir
Memoir is not an act of history, but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
inspirational dream sobriety
There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.