Quote of the Day (Mary Karr, on the ‘Emotional Conviction’ of Memoirs)

“Most memoirs will suck, as most novels do. But the most whiny memoir is written by someone passionately attached to his or her subject matter. And the connectedness of that single voice is something readers long for now. You get that connectedness in good fiction of course, even books with the chilliest narrators. But memoir guarantees emotional conviction of its writer, which is unfashionable nowadays—low-rent.”—American poet, essayist and memoirist Mary Karr quoted in Dick Donahue, “The Monday Interview: Mary Karr,” Publishers Weekly, Nov. 9, 2009