The Magnificent Mary Karr

       I saw Mary Karr last week, and am going to begin with how she ended. Here is the poem Mary Karr recited--by heart--after an audience member told her she carried a copy of the poem in her wallet for years.

A BLESSING FROM MY SIXTEEN YEARS' SON

I have this son who assembled inside me

during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,

in a heartbeat. Outside, pines toppled.

Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras.

Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.

Look at the muscled obelisk of him now

pawing through the icebox for more grapes.

Sixteen years and not a bone broken,

not a single stitch. By his age,

I was marked more ways, and small.

He's a slouching six foot three,

with implausible blue eyes, which settle

on the pages of Emerson's "Self Reliance"

with profound belligerence.

A girl with a navel ring

could make his cell phone go brr,

or an Afro'd boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell --

creatures strange as dragons or eels.

Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel

arcane as any oracle's. Bruce claims school

is harshing my mellow. Case longs to date

a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman

willing to do stuff she'll regret.

They've come to lead my son

into his broadening spiral.

Someday soon, the tether

will snap. I birthed my own mom

into oblivion. The night my son smashed

the car fender, then rode home

in the rain-streaked cop car, he asked, Did you

and Dad screw up so much?

He'd let me tuck him in,

my grandmother's wedding quilt

from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don't
blame us, I said. You're your own
idiot now. At which he grinned.

The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy

took it hard. He'd found my son

awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,

where he'd draped his own coat

over her shaking shoulders. My fault,

he'd confessed right off.

Nice kid, said the cop.

This is the pose she did after I said, "You're
61 years old? You look gorgeous!  I hate you."

         Here are some quotes of Karr's that I jotted down:

• She was asked by her agent? publisher? where she wanted to do a book signing? She--for sure--wanted to do Boston, because she had taught classes there. She said, "I went there for the signing, and three people showed up."

• "A lot of literature is about longing."

• "Memoir, if done right, is knocking yourself out with your own fist."

• "A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it."

• "I remember myself as smart. There was no evidence I was smart."

• (In writing memoir) "You get ambushed by the truth."

• (As a memoirist) "My goal is to make you feel something."

• "I'm an inefficient writer but a skillful editor."

• When writing one of her memoirs, she threw away 1,200 finished pages... "they went to live with Jesus."

• "I spend a lot of time in my head. I have a big inner life."

• "What is the difference between autobiography and memoir? Well, memoir sounds so much more French. Mem-wah."

• "The ass-whipping is easy to write. It's hope that's hard to write. Hope and love are hard to write."  

What writer would you most like to see in person, and why?