Cherry bomb

Mary Karr’s first book The Liar’s Club, a memoir of her East Texas childhood, has sold almost half a million copies since its publication in 1995, and more recently was optioned for a Hollywood butchering. Her new book Cherry is the sequel, a recounting of her sexanddrugsandrock’n’roll teenage years in language that is bone-hard, funny and brutally honest.

A poet, essayist and professor of English at Syracuse University, Karr writes prose that sits ill at ease with the long-winded descriptive dressage favoured by many of her contemporaries in the fields of academia and verse. Indeed, her use of the sawdust ‘n’ spittle Texan vernacular makes every phrase seem spat out; if Mary Karr were a songwriter, she’d be Lucinda Williams (“Oh I love her,” she purrs, “I mean, who doesn’t?”).

So was she born hardboiled or do folk get that way in Texas?

“Well yeah, they bred us for farm work,” she says with a dirty laugh. “I mean, they can’t kill us. We’re like cockroaches, walking between plough-handles lookin’ up a mule’s butt. So I think it breeds a certain kinda resilient quality.”

As you may have gathered, Karr talks like she writes: a hybrid of Bogart and Bacall chewing on Faulkner screen adaptations of Chandler novels.

“(In) the southern vernacular, a woman with an ample backside has ‘a butt like two bulldogs in a bag’,” she continues, “or if somebody’s ugly you’d say, ‘They’d make a freight train take a dirt road’. It’s not French-fried or sugar coated.”

Nor are her books. In fact, if Karr’s writings bear any relation to her background in poetry, it’s the Fred Voss school of dirty realism; poems about elbow grease and hammers and machine shops. Or in fiction, the great Harry Crews.

“Oh yeah, I love Harry Crews,” she admits, “I stole from him enormously. That book A Childhood: The Biography Of A Place, you’ve gotta read that, you’ll see I stole everything from him! Have you ever seen a picture of him, his tattoo: What Do You Think Of Your Blue Eyed Boy Now Mr Death? That’s a dark sonofabitch idinnit? I’ve never met him, but I aspire to.”

One of the more uncanny aspects of Mary Karr’s work is her power of total recall. It’s an attribute Stephen King admired in the opening paragraph of On Writing: “I was stunned by Mary Karr’s memoir The Liar’s Club… she is a woman who remembers everything about her early years.”

How does she do it?

“It’s funny, obviously I don’t remember all that shit,” she says, “I’ve only convinced myself that I do. I think if you’re any kind of memoirist at all, you get ambushed by the truth. In my case I like to remember myself as very smart but there’s really no evidence that I was (laughs). I flunked out of high school, I never read anything hard, I never wrote anything. So I think if you’re somebody who apologises a lot, which I do, you might make a good memoirist ’cos you question all the time – is this true or not? When Mary McCarthy wrote Memories Of A Catholic Girlhood in 1949 or 1950, she constantly apologised for what she doesn’t know and doesn’t remember. And I think now readers sort of understand that you cut a deal with them, they know your memory is a flawed mechanism.”

Trends come and go, but for long years the memoir was regarded as the idiot brother of the literary family, just as the novel was considered lowbrow in the age of epic verse. Yet it remains the medium with which Karr seems most comfortable.

“It’s an outsider’s art, clearly,” she admits, “like being able to carve the Lord’s Prayer in a grain of rice. Unless you’re Winston Churchill you think you’ve no business writing a memoir. But I think at this point, when our sense of objective history has been really eroded, and you’re an American who has lived through Richard Nixon and Watergate, there’s an erosion of faith in the church and government figures. And the 20th century was the century of the anti-heroic. I think the subjective has more authority than it used to have.

“Have you ever read Michael Herr’s Dispatches, about the Vietnam War? What do you believe is going to describe the Vietnam experience: the defence department reports or Herr’s sort of psychedelic, surreal visionary prose? I would throw down with Herr in terms of truth any day. I think a good memoir makes the strange familiar, you go into that world, it’s not reductive, it’s not a soundbite, it has great subtlety and variation. The way life does.”

Cherry is published by Picador in hardback at IR£14