Author

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

From Mary Karr

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

From Mary Karr

I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me.

From Mary Karr

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.

From Mary Karr

I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.

From Mary Karr

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.

From Mary Karr

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.

From Mary Karr