Memorists offer advice on successful writing

Memoirist Mary Karr and three other writers spoke Wednesday about writing a successful memoir, encouraging attendees to always stick to the truth.

The panel, held in Greenlaw, included Karr; Randall Kenan, a UNC English professor; Rosecrans Baldwin, a novelist and former journalist; and Marianne Gingher, a UNC English professor.

The panelists discussed how they entered the field of memoir writing, the trials they encountered and the literary methods they engaged.

Baldwin, who penned “Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down,” after living there for two years, warns that plot should not be doctored to make it more interesting.

“If you think that will improve the drama, you’re focusing your energies in the wrong way,” he said.

Karr, who rose to prominence through her New York Times bestselling memoir, “The Liars’ Club,” argued that you will never be able to exactly reconstruct a memory.

“Where do you stop the story? In that sense, of course it’s a corrupt form. Just don’t make things up,” she said.

The panelists discouraged fabrication in memoirs.

“Hoaxing in the James Frey sense is cheap,” Baldwin said.

Karr praised Michael Herr for being honest about the limits of his interpretation in his memoir “Dispatches.”

“You don’t read it for fact but emotional experience,” she said.

The writers also said that you do not need a particularly spectacular life to write a good memoir.

Gingher, author of the memoir “Adventures in Pen Land: One Writer’s Journey from Inklings to Ink,” who moderated the event, said events in your life do not have to be traumatic.

“The reader should know who the writer is, and the voice should be intimately tied up with that,” Karr said.

Baldwin said memoirs must be appealing and relatable.

“If it doesn’t have a deep level of story and insight it won’t do well,” Baldwin said. “Ninety-nine percent of people will not have had the same experiences.”

Karr also pointed out that successful memoirs need to be high quality.

“There needs to be a differentiation between sound bite memoir and highly literary memoir,” she said.

The writers gave various reasons for why they produced their memoirs.

Karr, Gingher and Baldwin admitted that financial reasons influenced them initially.

“I did it for the money, and as Samuel Johnson said, ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,’” Karr said.

Kenan joked that he had got into the genre by accident through his editor.

“I am a reluctant memoirist,” he said.

Kenan said memoir and nonfiction restrict creativity more than fiction does.

“The restriction is uncomfortable. There’s also a delicacy so as to not hurt anyone’s feelings,” he said.

Baldwin said he preferred writing memoirs.

“Nonfiction is the best because you get all the tools of fiction writers, but don’t have to wrench it out of your imagination.”

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