Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world.”

The Art of the Memoir by Mary Karr

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CBR 15 Bingo – North America I was gifted this book for my 40th birthday as I had made it known to many of my friends that I started working on my own memoir-ish book. In the time since I started my book, I have stopped and started and stalled many times over so I waited months to crack this open, as it sat taunting me, bursting with the expertise of the lauded memoirist Mary Karr. When I finally got over myself and begrudgingly and […]

Not exactly as advertised

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The Liar’s Club (1995) a childhood memoir by Mary Karr, is another book on my list of 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40. Unfortunately for me, the first blurb on Amazon, from Oprah.com, says that this book is “wickedly funny and almost movingly illuminating.” The next paragraph states, “The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of Mary Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood.” With this kind of [mis]information, I was imagining a lighthearted comedy, so I eagerly put it on my Kindle to read while on […]

The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grain size hole through which numb seconds are sliding.

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I recently read Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir and thought it was very good. I’d never read her or her memoirs before, so it was interesting dive into a writer who, being from Texas, which is not the South, but is not not the South either, and given how many Southern Lit classes I took in college, should have come up. Also, I used to live near Syracuse, so again…I am also interested in her other memoirs and will probably read The Liar’s Club […]

I’ve said it’s hard. Here’s how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little.

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I teach a Dual Enrollment class, and we’ll be starting off the year with a memoir/autobiography section in order to allow students to write their college essays. While this same thing happened last year, it wasn’t quite what I wanted going in, and so the results were mixed. This year I am upping the intensity a little, and making the students read a lot more in preparation. So I have been reading a handful of books about memoir as well as a number of memoirs. […]

“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”

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I feel like I’ve read a lot of dysfunctional family memoirs lately, but this was probably one of the best-written memoirs (most dysfunctional families), up there with The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. “Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.” Mary Karr grew up in the 1960s, mostly in a poisonous east Texas oil town called Leechfield, although she did spend […]

Like most people, he lied best by omission….

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Mary Karr’s award-winning memoir of her early childhood in 1960s East Texas reads like a novel. This poet knows how to spin a yarn, and in this case, a mostly true story that focuses on the years she was about 6-8 years old. Mary and her older sister Lecia lived in a dysfunctional household, to say the least. At the center was their mother, an alcoholic who was battling depression and rages, the origins of which are revealed at the very end. Karr is an […]



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