Mary Karr and Calvin Trillin on Memoir, A City Arts and Lectures event

Last night, we went to see Calvin Trillin and Mary Karr talk about memoir as part of the City Arts and Lectures series (benefiting 826 Valencia, a NPO helping students 6-18 learn to write). DeAnne gave me the tickets bc at the last minute she couldn’t make it (had to go to LA for work). Jon Carroll introduced Mary Karr as the person who wrote “The Liars Club” and many many books of poetry. He introduced Calvin Trillin as the person who wrote half the magazine articles you’ve read in your life. He also wrote a memoir about his late wife, Alice.

Mary Karr was quick-witted and funny. Calvin Trillin was funny too, but not at all quick. It took some time to get into the rhythm of his speaking pattern and humor, but once we did he was mesmerizing. I hung on his every pause. Per DeAnne’s request, I took notes.
• MK thought she put everything she knew in her first book. Now she’s on her third.
• Jon Carroll asked if any family members or neighbors objected to the ugly things she said in her book. She said everyone knew those things. For example, the fact that her mother tried to stab her, well, she knew that she did that. It wasn’t a high point in her parenting, but it happened, and it went into the book. Likewise, that MK said that the TX town she grew up in was ugly – everyone living there knows that even though they’re from TX.
• Along the same lines, she said that she loves her mother, that 40-some-odd years of being loved by her mother wasn’t negated by this one incident where her mother tried to stab her.
• CT wrote an article about his wife where he made her a sitcom character. The book was to make her real.
• For (memoir) writers, family members are the collateral damage of war. CT said that the Dostoyevsky Rule gives you the right to tell your family’s secrets. That is, if there’s a chance you’re as great a writer as Dostoyevsky, you are entitled to share your family’s secrets. If there’s no chance of that, you aren’t entitled to it.
• MK: Memoir is different than therapy bc when you write a memoir they pay you.
• Reading memoir, or any portrayal of family (Jerry Springer? Father Knows Best?) puts your family on a spectrum with other families: you know yours is not as “perfect” or as “crazy” as that one.
• Literature makes us a community. It connects us. You read about other peoples’ families, and you can relate to their issues and learn from their experiences.
• Memory is the pellet that you put in the water of memoir and it blooms into a flower (like the kind you would get at a circus).
• CT: Your family becomes the characters in your novel. You take away their ability to write their own stories about your shared history.
• The “Quirky Beast” (such as the New Yorker) – if you tinker with it, it will fall apart. But understanding how it works now is impossible.
• A member of the audience mentioned Jon Carroll’s recent NPR piece on the benefits of failure (I am very interested in this idea.) and asked the writers about theirs.
o MK gave a few examples. One was that she is now a Guggenheim Fellow. She applied for that fellowship 18 times!
o CT described an article he wrote about a small island country called Naru. It’s on mineral deposits and turned out to be more valuable for minerals than as a country. The New Yorker bought it, but never printed it. He recently learned that they use that article to test people who want to work for the New Yorker as a copy editor. An audience member pointed out that, like the country, his article was more valuable as a copy editing test (minerals) than its intended purpose (reading pleasure, or a country).
• Another audience member mentioned that her family loves to read CT’s poetry in The Nation together.

Jared has… mentioned… my disclosures (he said he feels like Jerry Springer’s wife), and I wonder if this event helped him understand where I’m coming from a little better. I want to look into this idea of the benefits of failure some more….