Mary Karr
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Articles by Mary Karr
Mary Karr on Catholicism, memoir and 'The Liars' Club,' 3 decades later
The bloody, incarnadine cover of The Liars' Club blares like a warning, an alarm. Its language — frank, sturdy, trenchant, startling — details a southern upbringing marred by the violence and volatility of a Tennessee Williams play. A no-holds-barred narrative of a turbulent childhood in 1960s East Texas, it is decidedly impolite; it "sets prudence aside" and emerges as "one of the rawest memoirs by a serious American writer in years," proclaimed The New York Times in 1995.
Mary Karr’s “The Voice of God”
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The Liars' Club by Mary Karr
‘You’ll want to forget it and won’t be able to’ – Zadie Smith ‘The essential American story’ – The Washington Post My father comes into focus for me on a Liars’ Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can’t but write it in the present tense. Mary Karr grew up in a swampy East Texas refinery town in a volatile and defiantly loving family.
Early Morning Gumbo
Celebrating women's voices for Women's History Month Join me, Diane Karl, in celebrating women's voices in folk music as we enter Women's History Month! We'll hear from many of your favorites, both solo and in groups. And we're helping to set the stage for KBOO's special programming for International Women's Day this Friday which starts with a special edition of Cascade Coffee House hosted this week by Diane Hunt.
The best memoirs that crack open an unknown, brutal, and beautiful world
Mary Karr holds nothing back. She drives us through vast, windswept west Texas of my home to the piney woods 650 miles east with her remarkable, outrageous family. I felt the dust on my teeth and the tingle of danger just around the corner. She manages to introduce us to her gun-toting mom and alcoholic dad without making them two-dimensional villains. The nuanced characters are clearly deeply flawed humans who are doing the best they can. I gasped, winced, laughed, and cried reading The Liar’s Club.
7 Memoirs About Addiction by Women Writers
Reading Lists Claudia Acevedo-Quinones recommends intimate stories about the struggle with drugs and alcohol and the journey to recovery My most transformative reading experiences have been ones in which I see the worst parts of myself in full display on the page.
Top Best Memoir Books of All Time
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (1933) Down and Out in Paris and London is the English novelist George Orwell's first full-length work, published in 1933. It is a two-part memoir on the issue of poverty in the two cities. Its intended audience was middle- and upper-class members of society-those more likely to be highly educated-and it exposes poverty in two rich cities: Paris and London.
Klub lhářů - Mary Karr
O knize Klub lhářů Dnes již kultovní dílo americké spisovatelky zařadily The New York Times mezi nejlepší memoáry za posledních padesát let. Nesentimentální, dojemné a vtipné vyprávění o apokalyptickém dětství získalo řadu literárních ocenění. Autorka láskyplně reflektuje bouřlivý život s alkoholickými rodiči a starší sestrou. Matka je psychicky labilní umělkyně, která se provdala za dělníka pracujícího u naftových vrtů ve východním Texasu. Prudkými vášněmi ovládá celou rodinu.
Quotes That Evoke the Warm Glow of Nostalgia
When we hear an old song, maybe one that was played at our high school prom or our wedding, we’re apt to feel a kind of fond, wistful longing — a yearning referred to as nostalgia. Nostalgia is a complex emotional state that can be triggered by a variety of stimuli, including music, photographs, scents, and objects.
Reader's Digest Releases Best 100 Books of All Time List
Reader’s Digest released a list of what it considers to be 100 of the best books of all time yesterday. The list, which it describes as consisting of books that “open our minds to new characters, points of view, and worlds,” is a mix of nonfiction and fiction. There are bestsellers on the list, as well as award-winners, and some that have had some other kind of impact on Western literature and society.
The Liars' Club
“Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet's ear.”–Oprah.com The bestselling, hilarious tale of Mary Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation. took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D.
Mary Karr on Navigating Memory While Writing Memoir
The following is an excerpt from Joy Harjo’s The Art of Memoir and appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. At unexpected points in life, everyone gets waylaid by the colossal force of recollection. One minute you’re a grown-ass woman, then a whiff of cumin conjures your dad’s curry, and a whole door to the past blows open, ushering in uncanny detail. There are traumatic memories that rise up unbidden and dwarf you where you stand.
THE CRAFT OF WRITING Mary Karr on navigating memory while writing memoir. October 19, 2022 The following is an excerpt from The Art of Memoirby Mary Karr, published by Harper Perennial. At unexpected points in life, everyone gets waylaid by the colossal force of recollection. One minute you’re a grown-ass woman, then a whiff of cumin conjures your dad’s curry, and a whole door to the past blows open, ushering in uncanny detail.
“O,” by Mary Karr
I was pushing seventy and so was he when his tall body stepped into the kitchen air shimmering with garlicky gumbo. And I stepped inside his lineated arms and tilted my face up. How encircled I was. The whole sparkling metropolis around us revolved. Everything rose up for the first time. His tongue plush on the roof of my mouth, our names undone. He looked through round spectacles and eyes spiked gold staring far back into me like Dr. Chekhov from eternity’s dust jacket.
A Childhood
For the first time in Penguin Classics, Harry Crews’ highly acclaimed, evocative literary memoir of his Depression-era childhood in the rural South. A Penguin Classic Considered by Mary Karr as the “most overlooked” of the best memoirs ever written, A Childhood by Harry Crews captures the first six years of his life among impoverished tenant farmer families in rural southern Georgia.
Requiem for the New Year
On this first dark day of the year my daddy was born lo these eighty-six years ago who now has not drawn breath or held bodily mass for some ten years and still I have not got used to it. My mind can still form to that chair him whom no chair holds. Each year on this night on the brink of new circumference I stand and gaze towards him, while roads careen with drunks, and my dad who drank himself away cannot be found. Daddy, I’m halfway to death myself.
Loretta Lynn Leads the Way
It's KBOO's Fall membership drive! Please donate today. Air date: Sat, 10/16/2021 - 6:00am to 9:00am Three hours of entertaining country style music. Please join me for lots of good morning music this Saturday on Swing 'n' Country! There's a mellow start from Olivia Newton John (Have You Never Been Mellow?) and a classy finish from Lefty Frizzell (Life's Like Poetry). You can savor a set of music from Loretta Lynn's sensational career at about 7:30.
Blues and Better
Air date: Wed, 09/08/2021 - 5:30am to 7:00am A variety of songs & musicians Please join me for today's Pastures of Plenty folk music program, which covers a variety of topics from a variety of musicians. The music starts with Odetta's Livin' With the Blues and ends with Mary Flower's Portland Town. In between you can listen to Jose Feliciano, Rosanne Cash, Bela Fleck, Peter Paul and Mary, John Hartford....
Exclusive: Huma Abedin Reveals the Cover of Her New Memoir, "Both/And"
In this beautifully written and propulsive memoir, Huma Abedin—Hillary Clinton’s famously private top aide and longtime advisor—emerges from the wings of American political history to take command of her own story. Huma Abedin's forthcoming memoir, Both/And, promises to take readers behind the scenes of one of the most notorious political sex scandals in recent memory, as well as shining a light on Abedin's longtime boss, Hillary Clinton.
A PBS episode about Flannery O’Connor will feature interviews with Hilton Als and Mary Karr.
For Flannery O’Connor enthusiasts and critics alike: PBS’s next episode in their American Masters biographical series focuses on Flannery O’Connor. The episode premieres on March 23rd and, as per PBS, features never-before-seen archival footage and newly discovered journals of O’Connor’s. The episode also features interviews with Hilton Als, Mary Karr, Alice McDermot, Tobias Wolff, and others.
Angela's Ashes
Pulitzer Prize, Biography/Autobiography, 1997 National Book Critics Circle, Biography/Autobiography, 1997 Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, movingly read in his own voice, bears all the marks of a classic. Born in Depression-era Brooklyn to Irish immigrant parents, Frank was later raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. His mother, Angela, had no money to feed her children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely worked, and when he did, he drank his wages.
You're Obsessed with Hallmark Movies
Hi friends, I hope you had a relaxing Thanksgiving, even if it was different than in previous years. The one thing that was the same for me as it was in other years was the sheer amount of reading I did. It was fantastic. As we gear up for the holiday shopping season, let me know if I can help you pick out a book for a loved one (or a present for yourself). Feel free to reply to this email or leave a comment describing what you’re looking for.
Five Books Expert Recommendations
Tara Westover’s account of her fundamentalist Mormon upbringing—and subsequent decision to leave her family to pursue a career in academia—has been a publishing sensation. For a period of months it became a fixture on bestsellers lists worldwide, and amassed a number of significant literary awards. But you don’t need us to tell you that.
The Art of Memoir
Bestselling author and renowned professor Mary Karr offers a master class in the essential elements of great memoir—delivered with her signature wit, insight, and candor. Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well. For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse.
Illiterate Progenitor
My father lived so far from the page the only mail he got was marked Occupant. The century had cored him with its war, and he paid bills in person, believed in flesh and the family plan. In that house of bookish females, his glasses slid on for fishing lures and carburetor work, the obits, my report cards, the scores. He was otherwise undiluted by the written word.
Disappointments of the Apocalypse
Once warring factions agreed upon the date and final form the apocalypse would take, and whether dogs and cats and certain trees deserved to sail, and if the dead would come or be left a forwarding address, then opposing soldiers met on ravaged plains to shake hands and postulate the exact shade of the astral self—some said lavender, others gray.
How to Write a Romance
A unique, beautifully designed journal filled with helpful tips and invaluable advice vital for every aspiring romance novelist—and every romance fan! For romance writers and readers alike, How to Write a Romance is a sleek, inventive journal that will inspire you to create love stories that stir the heart, tease the imagination, and touch the soul. Inside this handy diary, you’ll find an introduction and tip sheet compiled by the editors of Avon Books, the premiere romance publisher.
Best Memoirs For Summer Reading
This story was written in collaboration with Forbes Finds. Forbes Finds covers products we think you’ll love. Featured products are independently selected and linked to for your convenience. If you buy something using a link on this page, Forbes may receive a small share of that sale. The memoir has blossomed in popularity for many reasons, starting with the changing nature of the fiction and the fact that everyone has a story to tell.
Mary Karr Thought Her Whiting Award Call Was a Prank and Hung Up
Receiving the Whiting marked the beginning of my career like a star decal on a map. Before it, I was wandering through a black landscape, scraping and bowing and lunging and clutching at any wisp of literary opportunity. I submitted my lady’s verses by the sheaf. I wrote reviews and essays for little mags. I spent more on postage and entrance fees in a year than I’d raked in from my writing over more than a decade, for I’d been doing all this since I was about 20 and dumb as milk.
Field of Skulls by Mary Karr | Poetry Foundation
Stare hard enough at the fabric of night, and if you're predisposed to dark—let’s say the window you’ve picked is a black postage stamp you spend hours at, sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love Lucy reruns have gone off—stare like your eyes have force, and behind any night’s taut scrim will come the forms you expect pressing from the other side. For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania. They’re plain once you think to look.
The 22 Books Every Woman Needs To Read
Walking into a bookstore can be overwhelming. And heaven forfend you go onto Amazon! There are so many books out there that it makes you wonder why they’re always saying the publishing industry is in its death throes. If you know you’re looking for a copy of The Hunger Games, then you’re golden, but lots of readers just like to browse for something good to read. That is, until we start ripping our hair out.
The Burning Girl by Mary Karr
While the tennis ball went back and forth in time A girl was burning. While the tonic took its greeny Acid lime, a girl was burning. While the ruby sun fell From a cloud’s bent claws and Wimbledon was won And lost, we sprawled along the shore in chairs, A girl with the thinnest arms all scarred and scored She sat with us in flames That not all saw or saw but couldn’t say at risk Of seeming impolite. And later we’d all think Of the monk who’d doused himself with gas, No aspect of our silly selves.
Suicide’s Note: An Annual
I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that I couldn’t today name the gods you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d roast in Hell poor suffering bastards like you, unable to bear the masks of their own faces.
Who The Meek Are Not
Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep in the rice-paddy muck, nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles make the wheat fall in waves they don't get to eat. My friend the Franciscan nun says we misread that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them. To understand the meek (she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop in a meadow, who - at his master's voice - seizes up to a stunned but instant halt.
Mary Karr - Tropic Of Squalor - Book Review
Mary Karr has made a life, a brilliant one, of telling stories about herself, from her scrappy Texas childhood to getting sober and converting to Catholicism in adulthood. Karr’s fifth collection of poetry reveals one of the strongest voices in contemporary letters in conversation with itself, pushing back against the constructed self, ever more aware of the geological transformation wrought on identity by time, work and circumstance.
James Fallows - Our Towns - Book Review
The road trip. The Wright Brothers. What could be more American? How about putting the two together? Husband-and-wife team James Fallows and Deborah Fallows did just that, flying their small, single-engine propeller plane back and forth and up and down the United States over five years and 100,000 miles, a journey they document in Our Towns. When the couple set out in 2012, they expected to find problems and poverty, and they did.
Margaret Bradham Thornton - A Theory of Love - Book Review
“You see, the trick in life is learning how to see differently. . . . Castiglione taught the Chinese about perspective—parallel lines versus converging lines.” Helen Gibbs is a captive, if not exactly rapt, audience when an art dealer shares this theory. Helen is a British journalist whose assignments carry her around the world and often lead to conversations with interesting and self-important people.
Surviving the Ordinary: Why We Need Memoirs of Regular Lives
I am 100 percent here for a good stranger-than-fiction memoir. Do I want to know how someone escaped a cult, pulled off a heist, or became famous after surviving a freak accident? Absolutely. Send me your tales of life-and-death adventure. But I also want to read about the lives (and deaths) of people who face nothing extraordinary at all, whose stories exemplify the challenges and realities of common, daily existence.
Addiction and Recovery: Best Books by Female Authors
Books have been enormously helpful in my recovery. They allow you to relate to other people who are battling their own addictions. These books are especially inspiring and informative. They are equal parts honest, brutal, hopeful and inspiring. This was one of the first books I read when I started to come to terms with my own addiction. It is powerful and well written. It will stay with you. Elizabeth Wurtzel published her memoir of depression, Prozac Nation, to astonishing literary acclaim.
A Perfect Mess by Mary Karr
I read somewhere that if pedestrians didn’t break traffic laws to cross Times Square whenever and by whatever means possible, the whole city would stop, it would stop. Cars would back up to Rhode Island, an epic gridlock not even a cat could thread through. It’s not law but the sprawl of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing. Today I loved the unprecedented gall of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm.
Watch these poems come to life – The Washington Post – Medium
Illustration by Rafael VeronaNOT FADE AWAYBy Michael RobbinsHalf of the Beatles have fallenand half are yet to fall.Keith Moon has set.
“Carnegie Hall Rush Seats”
Whatever else the orchestra says, the cello insists, You’re dying. It speaks from the core of the tree’s hacked-out heart, shaped and smoothed like a woman. Be glad you are not hard wood yourself and can hear it. Every day the cello is taken into someone’s arms, taken between spread legs and lured into its shivering. The arm saws and saws and all the sacred cries of saints and demons issue from the carved cleft holes. Like all of us, it aches, sending up moans from the pit we balance on the edge of.
Descending Theology: The Resurrection by Mary Karr
Poet and memoirist Mary Karr was born in 1955 and raised in Texas. The author of several critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Abacus (1987; reprinted 2007), The Devil’s Tour (1993), Viper Rum (2001), and Sinners Welcome (2006) she is also the author of a trilogy of memoirs: The Liar’s Club (1995), Cherry (2001), and Lit (2009).
Best Memoirs Written By Strong Women | Reader's Digest
Readers fell in love with Cheryl Strayed's lovely and lyrical prose in this best-seller about finding healing when you're out on your own—like really on your own. Strayed's best-seller recounts her months on a solo hike on the Pacific Northwest Trail. She comes to terms with a past filled with the wrong men and other choices she'd rather forget. Most of all, her epic hike allows her the time and space to grieve the loss of her beloved mother who passed way too young.
Remembering September 11, 2001
I dug the magazines out of a box at the top of my closet: Time and Newsweek, the first few weeks of issues published after September 11, 2001. I’d kept them just as my grandmother had kept her Life magazines that covered the Kennedy assassination. Terrible events, captured in the context of the time in which they happened: first photos, first reactions, first information. I got them out this week because my nineteen-year-old daughter Megan was asking about September 11th.
WITNESS - The New Yorker
PERSONAL HISTORY about meeting a woman who witnessed the author's crippling automobile accident ten years ago. It is fall 1996, and he is in a wheelchair. Every Thursday, he drives thirty minutes to Andover and picks up his daughters Cadence and Madeleine, fourteen and nine, from school. He takes them to their house to walk the dog, then to his house for dinner (cooked by a woman he pays), then back to their house, and hosts a writers' workshop at his house.
The Bodily Terror of Women’s Gymnastics
In Rio this week, with Simone Biles as the lodestar, the phenomenally able United States women’s gymnastics team is drilling to gold with an almost shocking professionalism. As expected, China and Russia have lagged behind them by intervals that are ten times larger than the norm. There has, as yet, been no suspense or obvious pain in this traditionally suspenseful and painful quadrennial ritual.
On a Shockingly Casual Case of Sexual Assault
Then an approaching guy chatting equably with a tall friend dodged at me to grab my crotch. I don’t mean brushed by it maybe accidentally; I mean he grabbed between my legs with a meaty claw, big as a waffle iron. He also called me the C-word with breath that stank of beer. Then he passed on into a sandwich shop with his buddy. He wore a royal-blue plaid short-sleeve shirt you might find in a J. Crew ad, nicely hemmed jean shorts, and pricey sneakers.
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, August 11th
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A Wondrous Remake of “Pete’s Dragon”
If the name of the director of “Pete’s Dragon” were kept under wraps, the artistry displayed throughout the film would be a surprise. The director is David Lowery, whose 2013 feature “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” a sort of modern and modernist updating of Western tropes, is a powerfully intimate drama with a vast lyrical resonance.
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