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
avoid checking days five four good lapse might morning online till until written
For days on end, I avoid the Web, never logging in until about two or three, after I've written all morning. On a good week, I don't go online till after Wednesday, so four or five days might lapse without my checking e-mail.
god
There are all kinds of things God wants me to do that I'm very obstreperous about.
information music poetry prose
Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.
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.
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.
art conviction morally people strongly useful
My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.
tv
I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.
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.
believe came god south
It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck.
drafts
Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.
both consistent involve partly people practice skeptical sort suspicious
Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of flaky - New Agey, you know? Which is partly why I'm suspicious of that sort of thing. I'm skeptical of any spiritual practice that doesn't involve other people and doesn't involve some sort of consistent tradition.
astonished
I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me.
coming exactly family people
I always thought my family was so bizarre, so when people started coming up to me and saying, 'My family was exactly like yours,' I was completely knocked out.