Calvin Trillin on Memoirs

So your first pick is The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. Why did you choose that to start with?

It’s one of my favourite memoirs. I think she manages to capture the city that she lived in, and its surroundings, beautifully – you can almost smell the oil refineries. I don’t believe she names the city, but it’s in that east Texas, Gulf Coast area where there are a lot of people who work on the rigs. So she captures that, and I felt it was an honest book. I give people a little leeway on memoirs. On regular non-fiction, I have orthodox views (or somewhere between Orthodox and Hasidic probably) – but when it comes to memoirs, I don’t really expect that the sentence that is being quoted from when the person was four years old, you can go to the bank with, but I feel it is their story. And I found hers essentially believable.

One of the reviews of Mary Karr’s book claimed it was the book that really kicked off the current vogue in memoirs…

I’m not sure that’s true. There’s a book by one of the Mitford sisters, Jessica, called Hons and Rebels. That was written in the 1950s – so it’s a form that’s existed for a long time. What may be different about a lot of the recent memoirs is the writers are not necessarily well known. Mary Karr is a poet and poets in the United States, you don’t even have to say they are not well known because there aren’t any well-known poets. So I think that’s one difference between a memoir and an autobiography – the person doesn’t have to be a household name to write a memoir. Maybe Mary Karr’s book started that – the idea of somebody just having an interesting story.

Your next choice is John Mortimer’s Clinging to the Wreckage.

Oh I love that book! And that’s more than his childhood; he gets up to when he’s working for the BBC. I just thought it was a great example of graceful writing, not just the right words, but also the right number of words. He just picked out things from his life. And I know he wrote about this in several places, but I believe that was the first portrait of his father. I read it years ago, but the picture of his father is still in my mind.

Wasn’t he a bit of a rogue?

His father was a blind matrimonial lawyer.

I meant Mortimer.

I knew Mortimer slightly, I rather enjoyed him! I heard him speak once and I thought he was an enormously gifted speaker. He had a good memory of his childhood and he talked about leaving prep school. And the headmaster had all the leavers, the people who were ready to go out into the world at age 12 or 13, into his study at the end and said to them all: “You’ll have dreams! You’ll have dreams and you’ll wake up and say, ‘You rotter!’” I loved that. Mortimer was a very witty writer and I like almost everything he wrote.

And when you say it’s the right length, you mean it’s short?

Yes. He doesn’t tell you a lot of things. That’s one of the differences between memoirs and autobiography and particularly biography. Most memoirs are short, while recent biographers have felt that they have to take up the whole road so there’s no room for anybody else. So they write these biographies that are 600-800 pages long. I don’t know of anyone whose life is that interesting in detail. Then he got into fourth grade and so on. I find these huge doorstops just impossible. Picking out a few themes and writing about them is what I prefer to read.

Anything else you like about John Mortimer’s?

As I say, I still have the picture of the father in my mind and I still remember the great title. The guy who told him in a bar that he had survived years of sailing by taking to heart the advice that if the boat ever overturned, what you should do is cling to the wreckage rather than swim to shore…

Your next choice is by the long-time New York Times columnist Russell Baker.

Yes, I thought Growing Up was a model memoir. I know he was sort of stuck on it for a while, and then he found these letters that his mother had exchanged during the Depression. And there was a lot of reporting in that book. I think if you take somebody like Baker, who has spent his life mainly as a reporter, he has a different approach to memoir, than someone who has spent her life, say, as a poet. In the first place, he is much more concerned with, “Hey, did that really happen or am I just making it happen?”

Also, it’s establishing place that I often find the most satisfying part of any book. Good mysteries, for instance, I don’t find interesting because of the puzzle of “Who did it?” Really good mystery writers establish a sense of place and Mary Karr did that with The Liars’ Club. And, in the same way, Russell Baker did that with the era he’s writing about in Growing Up.