The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

Author:Mary Karr
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

12 | Dealing with Beloveds (On and Off the Page)

Families exist to witness each other’s disappointments.

Laura Sillerman

Methods for dealing with family and friends differ as radically as writers do. On one end sit memoirists—mostly women—who interview and almost collaborate. Carolyn See rewrote her Dreaming in response to family comment. On the other sit those with enough moxie not to give a rat’s ass—all men, in my experience. Frank Conroy claimed he did Stop-Time without much interest in his own clan’s response at all. “If they’d have disapproved, I wouldn’t have changed a word.” My friend Jerry Stahl, whose Permanent Midnight challenged family history by renaming his father’s death a suicide, once said, “If you had to live it, you get to write it.”

The gender divide makes sense. Men can become men by rebelling against their folks—the angry young rock-and-roller stealing the car or standing up to the patriarch is an archetype—Oedipus slaying his father to marry his mother. But for a woman to kick her mother’s ass is unseemly. When I half chastised Lucy Grealy for—in her Autobiography of a Face—not explaining why her family seemingly abandoned her in the UK during the agonizing cancer treatments she underwent as a teen, she said, “Women are repositories of clan lore, and our femininity is gauged by the security of family relationships. To drag out the dirty laundry almost masculinizes a woman.” Of course we gossip and worry stories with each other in ways that would horrify many of our male kinfolk. But publishing such gossip, Lucy suggested, was something much worse.

Geoffrey Wolff bemoaned the effects of Duke on his prim mother, who’d been called a nasty name by a scumbag reviewer. “After that,” he’d told me, “it was clear she wished the book had never existed.” He particularly warned me off TV talk shows where complex family issues get warped into sound bites:

You take the people you love most in the world and make them characters in a narrative. Then you lose control of that narrative. . . . Dick Cavett found my life droll.

Then Toby’s book came out to wild acclaim. I’d twice met their mother—immaculately coiffed and tiny. I sat behind them all in the movie version of This Boy’s Life. She’s played by a chirpy Ellen Barkin, Toby by Leo DiCaprio; De Niro does the awful stepdad. Toby had to urge the director to edit out a supersexual part. “How could I have witnessed such a thing!” The New York Times Magazine quoted Geoffrey as saying:

Here’s this woman—she’s been written about once. The train’s rolled over her going north. She picks herself up and dusts herself off, and here comes the train about to back over her.

Mother Wolff’s quip: “If I’d known both my boys were going to be writers, I might have lived a little differently.”

Now comes the juncture where I either detail my own travails with others or end the chapter. The trusty literary advisers I call my Kitchen Cabinet have warned me off spending time here on my own processes.

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