Mary Karr on Character Transformation

If you want to find someone to blame for the wealth of tell-all memoirs published since the early or mid 1990s, you have no further to look than Mary Karr. She took memoir to a new level.

In her trio of books--Liar's Club, Cherry, Lit--she chronicles her life from her mothers emotional meltdown and volatile marriage to her father to coming of age as a teenage girl in south Texas to finding sobriety and reaching beyond the wounds of childhood, not to mention the wounds she caused.

My favorite of the three is Lit. But I recommend you read all three.

In an interview published in the Paris Review (my current obsessive read) Karr lays out in a succinct way what it is that makes for a good memoir:

INTERVIEWER -- In your memoirs you barely mention your college years, or the years just following. Why?

KARR -- You remember through a filter of self. The periods in your life when that self is half formed, your memories are half formed too. In Lit I wrote in passing about lurching around, getting drunk in punk bars. My best friends had a band called the Suicide Commandos who toured with the Ramones, so I hung out with them a bit. But getting drunk with the Ramones—who cares? The through-line has to be a change in your character, and being loaded seldom involves psychological advancement. No character change, no plot.

No character change, no plot. Worthy of another tattoo for my arm, perhaps. This statement sums up the heart of what all good storytelling should contain: The primary character(s) go through a process of personal transformation or change. This happens in Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Flies, The Year of Magical Thinking, To Kill a Mockingbird, and on and on.

If you or your character does not go through some meaningful transformation, awakening, realization, change, etc., your story will be lacking.