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
hours kid piece raise six work
On a piece of prose, you have to work at least six hours a day. I don't know how you can do that and teach and raise a kid and paint the house.
addictive buy coke counting diet god last people
I have a completely addictive personality. Diet Coke is my last - God, I know people counting days off Diet Coke; I'm such a Diet Cokehead. Now I won't let myself buy it.
information music poetry prose
Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.
tv
I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.
god permits willing
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.
affected huge money success writers
Success has affected my self-definition in that I have more money. Writers pooh-pooh that idea, but it's a huge deal.
coming exactly family people
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.
god
There are all kinds of things God wants me to do that I'm very obstreperous about.
astonished
I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me.
drafts
Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.
believe came god south
It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck.
avoid checking days five four good lapse might morning online till until written
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.
antiquated exalted less tortured
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.
classes critical elements life memoirs might since teaching
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.