Recently stumbled across this wonderful tidbit from memoirist and poet Mary Karr, writing in The NY Times about her process and fessing up to a some serious self-deception. An amazing example of how we edit our memories to justify ourselves:
And now, writing my own memoirs, I know God is in the truth. Only by studying actual events and questioning your own motives will the complex inner truths ever emerge from the darkness… The convenient sound bites into which I store my sense of self are rarely accurate — whose are? They have to be unpacked and pecked at warily, with unalloyed suspicion. You must testify and recant, type and delete.
Call me outdated, but I want to stay hamstrung by objective truth, when the very notion has been eroding for at least a century…
At one point, I wrote a goodbye scene to show how my hard-drinking, cowboy daddy had bailed out on me when I hit puberty. When I actually searched for the teenage reminiscences to prove this, the facts told a different story: my daddy had continued to pick me up on time and make me breakfast, to invite me on hunting and fishing trips. I was the one who said no. I left him for Mexico and California with a posse of drug dealers, and then for college.
This was far sadder than the cartoonish self-portrait I’d started out with. If I’d hung on to my assumptions, believing my drama came from obstacles I’d never had to overcome — a portrait of myself as scrappy survivor of unearned cruelties — I wouldn’t have learned what really happened. Which is what I mean when I say God is in the truth.
Update: Mary will be speaking at our 2013 Spring Conference in NYC!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0_2aWbOmJc&w=600]
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4 responses to “Mary Karr Edits Her Memories and Questions Her Motives”
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Joseph Bottum had a fantastic essay about this in First Things a couple years back: “The Judgment of Memory” (online here: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/12/003-the-judgment-of-memory-19). A snippet (the last two sentences of which may provoke a Lutheran response!):
“But I do see clearly at least one fact about modern memory: Those who pick up the vase of the past by the darker of Epictetus’ two handles have achieved no superior form of autobiography. Between the narratives of the old sentimental versions of family life and the details of the newer anti-sentimental accounts, we have still not found much of a way to write an American memoir or tell the story of an American childhood.
“Perhaps we never will. The great tangle of weak words and warped memory and streamlined narrative offers no apparent solution. The knot will not be untied by any memoir or story—by any confession, for that matter, or affidavit, or psychiatric review. Greater and lesser honesty remains, of course: this happened, that did not. But untruth tinges all the threads. In the end, every sentence with the word I in it is a lie: self-justifying, self-righteous, self-conscious, self-sick.
“Here, at last, is the theological point. Every story longs for closure, just as every human being hungers for understanding and every fact within us seems to ache for meaning. Locked down within ourselves, however, we cannot climb to the memory of memory—the place outside time from which to see time. The fact of God’s judgment is not merely a promise descending from above. It is the great human prayer, rising from below. Judgment waits for us, because we need it.”
and the Truth will set you free…I can’t help but think of Bilbo leaving the ring and then being told by Gandalf that he still had it in his pocket…I’ve had short term memory fails where I deny something I did less than a minute before!!!