Surviving Childhood, Making Art

I happen to be rereading both of the twin stars of the 90s memoir boom at the moment--The Liar's Club in preparation for Mary Karr's January reading, and Angela's Ashes for the purposes of writing a resource guide for high school students. Guess who is one of the writers giving Frank McCourt a shout-out (didn't notice this first time around) on the paperback? Yep, Mary Karr. She says: "Frank McCourt's lyrical Irish voice will draw comparisons to Joyce. It's that seductive, that hilarious."

Karr would probably be too modest to say it, but her own narrative voice has the same lyrical, seductive, hilarious appeal. Reading her vivid, imagistic prose, which is soaked in the poet's sensibility, you can almost feel the iciness of "a cooler's slush."

And she and McCourt have something else in common: they are both recounting terrible childhoods. Flannery O'Connor famously said that anyone who survives childhood has enough material for a book. Material, of course, is one thing; art is another. Beyond the suffering, the childhood worlds Karr and McCourt recall are very different in some ways; they grew up in very different societies. But what they both did as writers was to transcend feelings of anger and bitterness, at least on the page, and allow the children they were to live again. The memoirist who is an artist (and, goodness knows, we have enough around who are not) must paradoxically engage with and at the same time keep a certain detachment from their past selves. Not an easy thing to do. Quite the balancing act. It reminds me of the old Wordsworth definition of poetry: "Emotion recollected in tranquility," which I suspect Karr, poet and professor that she is, would endorse.

Posted on Mon, December 21, 2009 by Robert Cremins

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