Memoir and Mary Karr's "An Incomplete Checklist to Stave Off Dread"

In which I plug my experience into her checklist.

Jan 13, 2023

person writing bucket list on book — Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

This year, I’ve set up a passion planner.

I did last year as well and didn’t write in it, not once. I put stickers on the front cover and there it lay, all year, untouched.

But this year, I am already using my planner. It’s the year of the great pivot, where my teaching life gives way to my writing and editing life. I’m hanging out my shingle as an editor (I’ve been taking classes for almost a year now, and combined with 25 years of classroom writing teaching, I’ve found my niche), as a way to help fund my writing journey. (I thought writers made money .. hahahahahaha!)

But the writing journey isn’t all about planning and sitting your butt down and doing the work. It’s a continual shedding of skin, becoming new, learning with every writing session.

I didn’t come by Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir until after I finished my book, but hadn’t quite finished revising. (Truth be told, I keep tinkering, and will continue to tinker until an editor says “yes” and buys my book. It won’t be done until it’s on a bookstore shelf).

Karr’s memoir craft book has provided a great checklist against my work as you can see in this newsletter. But I’m moving on now. Near the end of her book, she offers a checklist of what occurs in her memoirs and in those she teaches. Here’s my self-assessment, comparing my work to her list:

Paint a physical reality. It’s impossible to avoid the drought, the changing weather in Kansas and the severe drought of Southern California during the time of my memoir (2004-2015). This reality colludes with The Waste Land to create both interior and exterior waste lands — physical, moral, and spiritual crises.
Tell a story. Mine is a story of identity, of love and loss, of broken trust and the will, despite all, to survive: My similarities to my brother and the mental illnesses that fated him and his children; my relationships with those suffering from mental illnesses and the betrayal of the psychiatric profession to reveal the diagnosis; after almost breaking, finding a balm in Eliot and ritual, a pain ritual to assuage emotional turmoil.
Package information about your present self or backstory so it has emotional conflict or scene. If I struggled with anything, it was this. My story is detailed, involved, so deciding what was necessary to tell became the challenge. I whittled away and reduced the 203,000 word draft in half.

Interior

Set emotional stakes - these could not be higher. My similarities to my brother were legendary. He suffered from major depression for 13 years before committing suicide. Running about against other people’s manipulations that left me broken left me on the edge. Would I go down my brother’s path, or would I find a way out of the waste land that had become my life? I am here, writing today. The stakes were the highest that could be.
Think, figure, wonder, guess. Show yourself weighing what’s true, your fantasies, values, schemes, and failures. Doing so has never been difficult for me. I don’t assume what others are feeling or thinking so I’m often pondering their motivations and questioning why things happen. What’s true for me wasn’t true for my partners. The rationale me often couldn’t accept that fact, and yet I fought back against the irrational as often as possible. When I blinked, I let myself be manipulated, although unwittingly, by other people and became an accomplice to their problems.
Change times back and forth — early on, establish the “looking back” voice and the “being in it” voice. I provide quite a bit of back and forth, but not so much as to create whiplash (I hope).
Collude with the reader about your relationship with the truth and memory. Do you remember everything that happened to you well? I’ve tried to share with the reader what I see as stories I’ve made up because I didn’t have access to a memory or to the truth of something. I have a very good memory, but I can see the holes in m stories like swiss cheese. Sometimes I run into facts in old emails and think, “Oh, I’ve been telling that story wrong for years.” The stories we tell ourselves are the ones we need to survive, but they often won’t stand up to truth. I’ve worked hard to uncover the personal truths necessary to understand my story.
Show not so much how you suffer in long passages, but how you survive. Use humor or an interjecting adult voice to help a reader over the dark places. I may need to revisit this. So much of my story is absurd and devastating, yet I was able to survive through some self-deprecation and humor and sheer will to continue on past that absurdity.
Don’t exaggerate. Trust what you felt deeply is valid. I’ve never exaggerated in my whole life! ;-) This is a story that hasn’t needed exaggeration. Truth is stranger than fiction, as is said.
Watch your blind spots—in revision, if not before, search for reversals. Beware of what you avoid and what you cling to. The cognitive dissonance of living with two people suffering from serious personality disorders and finding ways to cope in day-to-day life have led to my having to work to overcome those blind spots. Self-honesty isn’t a problem for me. It’s a matter of survival and healing.
Love your characters. Ask yourself what underlay their acts and version of the past. I won’t pretend that the people I have wronged or who have wronged me have kissed and made up. That just hasn’t happened nor will it happen. But the picture I paint in my book is one tinged with love for my life and experiences. I wouldn’t have reached this point today - with all that I have - without having gone through what I did.

The journey through my life, train wreck as it has been at times, is peopled with all types. I know not what motivated them most of the time, but I don’t live in those moments anymore. My healing was a journey for long before I started my book. Writing my memoir provided a necessary secondary degree of healing, of putting into perspective how I got to this present time.

So that’s Mary Karr’s list and my self-assessment. Does it make you want to read the book? Let me know. I can make a copy of the book available for beta readers. I’d love to know what you think. Leave a comment and I’ll provide a link to the manuscript.

My Own Private Waste Land

Discussion about this post