Internal Landscapes

For me, internal landscapes are where I’ve spent much of my time. If I’d lived with a video camera strapped to my head, it might represent events in clearer external detail, but it wouldn’t reveal my inner life. I know better than anybody else how I felt at fifteen or at forty. You might remember something I did that I don’t remember, but I know how I felt. The moral danger that I’m in every time I write a sentence is that I’ve interpreted somebody’s motivation incorrectly. I like the story—maybe apocryphal—about Melville devouring an entire bag of oranges in front of his daughter without sharing. How could such a person not be an asshole? Well, say he had scurvy. The trauma of my mother losing her first children doesn’t mean it’s no big deal that she tried to stab my sister and me with a butcher knife, but it in some way clarifies the action. Books offer what TV and film often skip over—the internal and historical truths.
-Mary Karr, Paris Review Interview