Читать книгу Lit: A Memoir - Mary Karr - Страница 17

The myth they chose was the constant lovers.

The theme was richness over time

It is a difficult story, and the wise never choose it

because it requires such long performance,

and because there is nothing, by definition,

between the acts …

—Robert Hass, “Against Botticelli”

It would’ve been a vintage personal ad. Scared, provincial girl desperate to escape family insanity seeks quietly witty, literate gorilla. Profound loneliness a must. Belief in poetry must supersede belief in capitalism. She: abrim with self-loathing, incapable of chilly silence. He: won’t yell, wag firearms, or leave.

Were Warren laboring over this story, I’d no doubt appear drunkenly shrieking; spending every cent I could get my mitts on; alternately crowding his scholar’s home with revelers, then starting to vanish nights into a kind of recovery cult—none of this entirely untrue. I would’ve preferred that my ex vet this manuscript and correct the glaring flaws. Wisely, he balked—I’d have hated to see his version, too.

How to write it without self deceit? I set out to forge a family, but it fell apart. Know any divorcée who ever stops weighing fault for a marriage’s implosion on some divine scales?