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81 " For the more haunted among us, only looking back at the past can permit it finally to become past. "
― Mary Karr , The Art of Memoir
82 " It’s the disparities in your childhood, your life between ass-whippings, that throws past pain into stark relief for a reader. Without those places of hope, the beatings become too repetitive—maybe they’d make a dramatic read for a while, but single-note tales seldom bear rereading. "
83 " The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage. Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story. "
84 " You’re making an experience for a reader, a show that conjures your past—inside and out—with enough lucidity that a reader gets way more than just the brief flash of titillation. You owe a long journey, and most of all, you owe all the truth you can wheedle out of yourself. "
85 " All drama depends on our need to connect with one another. And we’re all doomed to drama; even the most privileged among us suffer the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human. People we adore drop dead or die over tortured years. We’re born ugly and poor, or rich and handsome but uncared-for. In even the best families, loved ones—however inadvertently—manage to destroy each other’s hope. They fail to show up at the key instant, or they show up serving grief and shame when tenderness is starved for. "
86 " In terms of cathartic affect, memoir is like therapy, the difference being that in therapy, you pay them. The therapist is the mommy, and you’re the baby. In memoir, you’re the mommy, and the reader’s the baby. And—hopefully—they pay you. (“No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money,” Samuel Johnson said.) "
87 " To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind. "
88 " The goal of a voice is to speak not with objective authority but with subjective curiosity. "
89 " We look at the world once, in childhood.The rest is memory. Louise Glück, “Nostos "
90 " Propaganda seeks to destroy art in order to sanitize culture. "
91 " No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self – your neat analyses and tidy excuses… Your small pieties and impenetrable, mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up. "p. xxi "