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" If dysfunction means that a family doesn't work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings, kids, marriage partners - the whole enchilada. "

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" When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me. "

Mary Karr

Thought

Fun

Goodbye

" I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen. "

" I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and I'm just an arrogant little thing. It's hard for me to admit that I can't understand something, let alone not be in charge of it. "

" Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging. "

" Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of flaky - New Agey, you know? Which is partly why I'm suspicious of that sort of thing. I'm skeptical of any spiritual practice that doesn't involve other people and doesn't involve some sort of consistent tradition. "

" It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck. "

" I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities. "

" I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer. "

Mary Karr

Anything

Week

" Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time. "

" Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about them. "

" I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive. "

Mary Karr

Problem

Media

" The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold. "

" I always thought my family was so bizarre, so when people started coming up to me and saying, 'My family was exactly like yours,' I was completely knocked out. "

Mary Karr

Family

Thought

" The audiobooks I buy are never first-time reads - only rereadings of books I know well that I find intoxicating. "

" Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down. "

" The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker. "

" There are all kinds of things God wants me to do that I'm very obstreperous about. "

" I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it. "

" As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. "

Mary Karr

Veracity

Strive

" Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it. "

" I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I've been that way, I've always been less exalted than I would have liked. "

" I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny. "

" I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient! "

Mary Karr

Even

Myself

" The thing I have to do as a writer, and that God permits me to do, is that I have to be willing to fail. "

" Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't. "

" I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years. "

" For days on end, I avoid the Web, never logging in until about two or three, after I've written all morning. On a good week, I don't go online till after Wednesday, so four or five days might lapse without my checking e-mail. "

" I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed. "

" Young writers often mistakenly choose a certain vein or style based on who they want to be, unconsciously trying to blot out who they actually are. You want to escape yourself. "

" The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard. "