## Metadata - Author: [[Mary Karr]] - Full Title: The Art of Memoir - Category: #books ## Highlights - once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them. In this, memoir purports to grow more organically from lived experience. ([Location 300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RLQXBYS&location=300)) - Boy (aka American Hunger), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Dispatches, The Woman Warrior, Stop-Time, The Kiss, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, The Color of Water, Good-Bye to All That, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Wild, The Duke of Deception, This Boy’s Life, and Speak, Memory—then I’ll lay out any wisdom about the form I’ve either gleaned from them or figured out on my own watch. For the prospective memoirist, I pepper in short lists and lessons. That’s what you’ll get here—me running back and forth between books I’ve taught and my own dispatches from the muddy trenches, where I wrote three books that basically beat my Texas ass. There’s a photo of writer Harry Crews on my office door students often ask about because it looks so savagely unliterary. On an English Department hall lined with posters ([Location 331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RLQXBYS&location=331)) - Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there’s suffering involved. ([Location 350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RLQXBYS&location=350)) - Neurologist Jonathan Mink, MD, explained to me that with such intense memories as David’s, we often record the emotion alone, all detail blurred into unreadable smear. ([Location 467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RLQXBYS&location=467))