Mary Karr
Mary Karr
Mary Karris an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth16 January 1955
CountryUnited States of America
reading flip heroin
Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.
prayer speech sacred
In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.
prayer air care
I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.
lonely mail sometimes
I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
doomed inconvenient
I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
blessed believe self
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.
effort trying world
I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they'll try -- without let up -- to break you.
years overnight-success publishing
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
smart school students
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.
husband wall lying
If you lie to your husband - even about something so banal as how much you drink - each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it's deflected away.
order years clothes
I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.
dad guy way
Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.
strive veracity
As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
inspire desire week
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.