Follow-up on memoir vs fiction

[Mark Kohut]

https://twitter.com/marykarrlit/status/708632423446274048

Couldn't quite believe that an exchange between Katherine Anne Porter and
Mary Karr could encapsulate the difference between fiction and memoir
so well.

And, I know writers differ, so this distinction is not universal but notice
how memoirist
Ms. Karr's writing has no envisioned 'ending' whereas a good writer of
fiction like
Ms. Porter knows how her fiction should end---in order to carry her themes
and overarching
meanings, I'd say.

(Of course, some fiction can be overly patterned and lifeless but, in
general the contingency
of memoir points to the personal not the illuminating aggregation of
thematic detail.)

I wonder if Ms. Karr's poetry is so unknown to her as she writes it. If so,
how does it not
become sketches---force of a thematic sensibility?





On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 6:07 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Changes in  the novel have helped to jack up memoir's audience as fiction
> grew more fabulist or dystopic or hyper intellectual under the sway of
> Joyce and Woolf and Garcia Marquez and Pynchon acolytes, readers thirsty
> for reality began imbibing memoir."   ---Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir 2105
>
> Well, maybe, Mary, partly......
>
> But I, who along with readers and critics' 'lengthy assaults' on memoir,
> such as by Wm Gass, Jonathon Yardley and James Wolcott will just add,
>
> Knausgaard and Ferrante have been hugely read as novelists bringing us
> back to 'reality'. And the rediscovery of* Stoner* and more and more.
>
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