Mary Karr interview

Ms. Karr: I’ve got to tell you, I would not trade the age I am now. I would not be younger. I would not be a week younger than I am, because I do feel — you can’t be compassionate to other people unless you’re compassionate to yourself. You can’t love other people unless you love yourself. Unless you have empathy for yourself and your own suffering and your own peccadilloes, you’re not going to have it for anybody else. So yeah, it took me a long time, obviously, to come to that, and I go in and out of it, but I have a lot more presence and a lot more joy. I eat a lot more chocolate. I don’t know. My head is a lot quieter after all of this — the 30 years of prayer and sobriety; the 20 years of being Catholic. I marvel and wonder a lot. I think I spend a lot of time kind of astonished by the human comedy: the hilarity of it and the beauty of it, and just the simple nobility of most people trying to get by. It’s a pretty thing to watch.

Ms. Tippett: The last line of The Art of Memoir, you write, “None of us can ever know the value of our lives or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world if only by how radically it changes us one and by one.” You were writing to other people, but that speaks, also, to the fact that even as you do that work you’re doing — on getting by, trying to be better today than yesterday — there is also this social good. There are these larger ripple effects that get set in motion, even by something — this is kind of a great mystery of life — even by something like writing memoir about the very particular world in which you grew up, the very particular parents you had.

Ms. Karr: Right, what Faulkner would call your “little postage stamp of reality.” Yeah, I think — it’s one thing I say to my friends who are atheists. I say: “Look, why don’t you — you think I’m so full of horse dookie. Why don’t you pray every day, for 30 days, and see if your life gets better?” And my guess is that it will, just because if you think — let’s say there’s not a God. Let’s say I die, and there’s not a God, and the worms eat me, and that’s the end of it. Daring to hope every day — it’s much more radical, I think, to hope than to live in the despair I was born to. I think it’s much more dangerous. I remember asking Tobias Wolff, when he saw his movie of This Boy’s Life, that great memoir, “Was it hard to watch?” I watched it. I sat behind him, and his family and his mother was there. And I said, “Boy.” I said, “I cried.” I said, “That was so hard for me. Was it hard for you to watch?”

He said, “Oh, it was really hard.” I said, “What was the hardest?” And I was thinking when his step-father is beating him, and he’s a young Leonardo DiCaprio. He said, “Oh, no, that didn’t bother me at all.” He said, “It was the hope. It was when we’re singing Christmas carols thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to be great,’ and we have this awful, awful family.” [laughs] And it’s much more radical, much more daring, and much more dangerous to hope.

Ms. Tippett: I think you’ve said similar things — that it’s easier to write about those terrible, dramatic moments, and harder to write about tenderness… 

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