Mary Karr, pt. 2

Every time I read more of Mary Karr's The Liar's Club I'm inspired to write (although it doesn't take much...any time I'm not sleeping or writing, I want to be writing). I was thinking to myself while reading -- it was one of those No-shit moments -- Oh, so that's how you end up with a 300-page memoir... . Mary covers one year in 174 pages; then another year, sometime later, up through page 271; and then, finally, another year, way later, to 320. And there ya go. 3 years, over 300 pages. The Devil is in the Details.

To wit: Say I happen to be walking along with something (or other things) "happening" in my life macroscopically -- but there's a pile of shit on the sidewalk that stops me. Enter microcosm. I bend down to get closer. I take my time here. I describe how the shit smells, and how I feel when I smell it. I speak of what the shit reminds me from my past, and revel with some new understanding and perspective on that old shit. I expound, using an extended metaphor of something comparable that reveals what this pile of shit "means" on a deeper level. I describe what color it is, the consistency, the little pieces in it (like grass, fur, spinach - yes, it could be human), and what those things remind me of, and what they mean. I think of the shit I'm going to take later (and when I do take that shit, I think of this shit and how it changed my life). And before I know it, I have a whole page or two (or even three) just on this pile of shit on the ground, really just a tiny blip in a moment of an experience in the day of a life.

That's how I felt while reading The Liar's Club earlier, waiting at Great Clips to get my hair cut (so a "No-shit" moment became a "shit" moment, lol) (and see, I could go off on why I was getting my hair cut - shitty last hair cut - and what my hair has been like since I got that last hair cut - shitty - and I could go on to tell you what my hair's like now - less shitty; borderline fabulous). (But back to Liar's Club...I've been told I have a parenthesis problem.) The first "day" of the memoir lasts pages and pages and pages. I've been trying to read it for two days now, and that "first day" still isn't over (granted, my attention to reading gets diverted when something triggers my itchy writing fingers). What I get from it, as afore-mentioned and afore-exemplified, are these: Details. Details. Details.

It just went to show me, I don't have to write my whole story from childhood to now in one blog post (to put it hyperbolically) (and that's why I'm enjoying focusing on relationships, because it puts my life into little shoeboxes with people's names on them). I do need to pay attention to every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every page, and make sure I'm not trying to fit any square pegs into a round "whole" (and see, I also have a problem with little mini metaphors running all over the place...like I'm a cat-herder...but that's a simile...). When I do write the "real" memoir after this 25-man blog project, it doesn't have to tell my "whole" life story, either. Hell, Mary wrote two sequels to The Liar's Club...with probably still more to be revealed. (So I could write my whole life story with my first memoir, but then what? I suck at creative fiction.)

Okay, one more cat, to sum up:

Each post is a grain of salt on the tip of an iceberg floating in the Ocean of Memoir.

Mary Karr

Day 28 of no men. I'm sitting here at a local Laundromat reading Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, recommended to me by a former writing professor of mine who's blog I'm following to see whether or not he's going to survive this bout of cancer. (We all know he will, again...but I'm on pins and needles, damnit.) His blog inspired me to start one. I'd all ready been instructed by the guy who wrote a popular sex and love addiction recovery book to make an "inventory" describing every relationship I've ever been in so I could see how the hell I made such a mess of my life. Now that I'm reading about a guy going through what sounds like living hell in a fight just to stay alive, the "hell" I thought I'd been living in doesn't seem so bad. Not that I'd want to go back there -- actually, the whole point of writing, for me, is so that I don't keep fucking men I don't even know and figure out why the hell I've been doing that for the past two years in the first place.

Of course, it was suggested I write about all my relationships: friends, family, co-workers, etc. It's a monumental task, so I'm just doing pieces at a time and letting myself write freely whatever comes to mind (and then edit like a maniac when it goes from my paper notebook to this notebook).

In Mary's "Introduction" she describes the power of narrative as cathartic and healing -- but even more than that, for me, it changes my very life in the present, every day. I'm not sucking some guy's dick in a church parking lot right now. (I couldn't have said that two months ago.) This weekend I read to my four year-old son the dinosaur book I bought him for his birthday in August, for the first time. (It's mid-November.) I haven't written much about my mom yet -- that post is drafted and will probably get published after maybe a good 'nother eight hours of editing -- but I when I was pushing my son on the swings this weekend, and my arms were getting tired, I realized that I actually have no memories of my mom ever taking me to a park. So I kept pushing him. Later, I called her, just to tell her that I love her.

I freak out every time I post because somehow I expect to tell the whole story, right then and there. I have to get over that. I guess I just want these secrets to stop making me so sick. I want to throw 'em up and run like hell.

"Run like hell!" That was my best friend Shawna's motto when I was 12. She was 15. She and I did all kinds of crazy things. Once we broke into a vacant apartment and peed on the kitchen floor, just for the hell of it. I thought of her while reading The Liar's Club's page XIV about a fan of Mary's who, as a girl, "got adept (as [Mary] had) at worming her way into other people's houses." I don't think that's what she meant, but still.

This is how you recover in a 12-step program: you go to meetings where people tell you what they were like, what happened, and what they're like now. If you want what they have (sobriety, happiness, freedom) and are willing to go to any length to get it -- then you buckle up for the ride of your life, hold on tight, and don't let go.

Step 5 is, "We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs." Then we let it all go, and carry our message of experience, strength and hope with others so that they may recover also.

The real reason I needed to sit and read and write right here and now at the Laundromat is because there's still a part of me that wants to go to that church where that guy will be tonight (#21: The Black Jack Dealer). But there's a better part of me that wants that part of me to die.

St. Francis of Assisi said it best: "It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life."

Amen.

"Talk about it, the old wisdom says, and you get better. From narratives about childhood, [we manufacture] a self, neither cut off from [our] past nor mired in it" (Karr, XIV).

So -- let's face the music, and dance.