(Some, like Koren Zailckas, have gone on to write best-selling memoirs of their own.) She has fleshed it out with analyses of some of her favorite memoirists’ work, but she can’t help being more interesting than her lesson plans. Karr acknowledges that this book began with the teaching syllabus she uses at Syracuse University, where merely becoming one of her students is a major achievement. The passionate part is what drew so many readers to “The Liars’ Club” (1995), a rip-roaring, child’s-eye psychodrama about her family’s life in East Texas, which she now calls “the Ringworm Belt.” The messy part leads her to create chapter headings like “Interiority and Inner Enemy - Private Agonies Read Deeper Than External Whammies.” Karr is, by her own admission, “a passionate, messy teacher.” There’s a textbook lurking at the heart of Mary Karr’s new book about how memoirs have and should be written.
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