Mary Karr Interview Paris Review

As a child, I also read a lot of books about being black: Black Like Me, Black Boy, Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. My mother had marched with Dr. King in Selma. Being estranged from the culture resonated with me. A big personal discovery came in the fall of 1971, when I read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and thought, You can write about these people? They weren’t like John Cheever characters with the deck shoes and Yale degrees and pools in the yard and sprinklers going whisk-whisk—well-bred dogs and sad, martini-drinking individuals who somehow kept their clothes dry-cleaned. Those people sounded like fodder for literature in ways we weren’t. Mother subscribed to The New Yorker, so I was exposed to the literary Ivy League, even in our little armpit of the universe.