Summary of Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 Memory is a pinball in a machine that messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of scenes, stories you’ve heard. But most of the time, we keep memories packed away.

#2 Around the room, with each student reading from a spiral notebook or legal pad, the mistakes popped up like dandelion greens. There were memory aces, but overall, the students' original, radical misjudgments.

#3 The mind can both recall and distort past events. The best minds warp and blur what they see. Episodic and autobiographical memory, which are memories of events and experiences, move into semantic memory, which are thoughts and concepts.

#4 You can bullshit yourself that you do your best, which is limited by the failures of your so-called mind. But memorized language can also calcify what’s in your head. Events can become stale when told by rote.