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41 " To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it. "
― Mary Karr , The Art of Memoir
42 " It takes an obsessive streak that borders on lunacy to go rummaging around in the past as memoirists are wont to do, particularly a fragmented or incendiary past, in which facts are sparse and stories don't match up. I don't know if memoirists as children are lied to more often as kids or only grow up to resent it more, but it does seem we often come from the ranks of orphans or half-orphans-through-divorce, trying to heal schisms inside ourselves. Like everybody, I suppose, people we loved broke our hearts because only they had access to them, and we broke our own hearts later by following their footsteps and reenacting their mistakes. "
43 " Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it. "
44 " Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, “I really want to have sex, where do I start?” What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another. "
45 " We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. Louise Glück, “Nostos "
46 " The creature you find in Speak, Memory is rare enough to be zoo-worthy. He’s not just smarter but somehow more effete than most of us without seeming put on. Resenting him for it would be like resenting a gazelle for her grace. He doesn’t sound prissy painting himself as a cultivated synesthete who can hear colors and see music, nor vain talking as a polyglot who translates his own work back and forth into many languages. He’s just your standard virtuoso aristocrat from a gilded age. Which is the miracle of his talent. He has shaped the book to highlight his own magnificent way of viewing the world, a viewpoint that so eats your head that you never really leave his very oddly bejeweled skull, and you value things in the book’s context as he does, never missing what you otherwise adore in another kind of writer. "
47 " I’ve said it’s hard. Here’s how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little. Between chapters of Stop-Time, Frank Conroy stayed drunk for weeks. Two hours after Carolyn See finished her first draft of Dreaming, she collapsed with viral meningitis, which gave her double vision: “It was my brain’s way of saying, ‘You’ve been looking where you shouldn’t be looking.’” Martin Amis reported a suffocating enervation while working on Experience. Writing fiction, however taxing, usually left him some buoyancy at day’s end; his memoir about his father drained him. Jerry Stahl relapsed while writing about his heroin addiction in Permanent Midnight. "
48 " sentimentality is only emotion you haven’t proven to the reader—emotion without vivid evidence. "
49 " Novels have intricate plots, verse has musical forms, history and biography enjoy the sheen of objective truth. In memoir, one event follows another. Birth leads to puberty leads to sex. The books are held together by happenstance, theme, and (most powerfully) the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past. "
50 " Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments. "
51 " Still, a living, breathing human being--even a boneheaded or barely articulate one--conveys so much in person. The physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering--what Shakespeare called the 'poor, bare, forked animal'--compels us all; we're all hardwired in moments of empathy to see ourselves in another. "
52 " The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain The "
53 " The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every "
54 " Students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot—mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don’t sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer’s best voice will grow from embracing her own “you-ness”—which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice. Which "
55 " I put just a teaspoon of catshit in your sandwich, but you didn’t notice it at all.” To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it. "
56 " The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain "
57 " I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of [man’s] puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. William Faulkner "
58 " (“No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money,” Samuel Johnson said.) "
59 " No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre. "
60 " whether you’re a memoirist or not, there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: "