YouSaid · the spoken record

Mary Karr

lines on the record: 113
first: 2024-06-11
most recent: 2024-06-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Me. Someone knows what it feels like to occupy this body. And I remember trying to tell other little kids in my neighborhood about it, about poems that I like to remember. There's a E.E. Cummings poem I once tried to tell some girls about in my school. You know, it's just spring and the world is mud luscious and the little lame balloon man whistles far and we and Eddie and Bill came running and it's spring and the world is a puddle wonderful and the goat-footed balloon man whistles firmwe something like that. I can't even remember it, but it's so long ago.”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She says don't do kids. And I was so mad. I said, Mother, you had four children. What do you mean you don't do kids? You don't cook, you don't clean, you haven't had a job in 40 years. What exactly do you bring to the party? And she thought for a minute and she said, I'm a lot of fun to be with. Yeah, I forgot to do anything for any other living human being, but I am fun to be with, which was not untrue. I guess I had an aesthetic sense. She played music. She played operas. She played blues. Janice Joplin grew up in my hometown, or whether I grew up in her hometown since she was older. Her brother would be in my high school carpool. So there was a lot of music I listened to. And I think poetry was part of that. The form, the shape. You know what it felt like, Tim, I felt less lonely. I was a lonely person and I would read these poems and I felt like someone understood.”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was supposed to watch my little boy. He was then a toddler when I went to an AA meeting. I came back one day and she was like, I can't keep him. He's just too, I mean, I was gone for an hour and a half.”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You said it better than I could, Tim. You win. I mean, it's not a joke that I use the Riverside Shakespeare as a booster seat. That's literally what happened. I sat. When I had to reach the table, I sat on this giant edition of Shakespeare my mother had that was very water stained. And it was a book that I read very early and I started memorizing not Shakespeare poems, but the speeches from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth and Richard III and I would memorize these speeches and say them to my hungover mother and she liked it. You know, it was something she incurred. I got her attention that way. She was a very, to say she was not nurturing, I mean, Lady Macbeth is probably not nurturing the way my mother was not nurturing. I mean, her disinterest in being a mother was profane. Let's just put it that way. She once said to me when I was early on when I was getting sober, I...”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People worship saints, and you know, have crosses blessed. I felt that way. And if you think about the idea of the Eucharist, we weren't Catholic. We were atheists. My father was a union organizer and said, you know, church is a trick on poor people to get their money away from them. And my mother was a kind of Marxist lady who was very smart and just a loose, a little bit of a loose canon. So we were not churchy in the Bible belt. Yeah, you take someone when you read a poem, you know, you put it in the meat of your body. I mean, you're a body person. I'm a body person. I feel like you take somebody else's suffering into you. And it changes you. It transforms you. I had this idea of being a poet starting when I was five or six years old that I wanted to be a poet. It was the strangest thing because there were no poets around.”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They won't let you drink or geez heroin when you're a little kid, but you can disappear down a valley of Winnie the Pooh or Charlotte's Webb. In some ways, the poets I read, I think a lot of times, I think poetry really captured me early. And my mother, who was a painter, had gone to art school in New York and was enormously well read. There were books all over my house in a place for the nearest bookstore. The bookstores in my town sold, you know, Bibles as big as station wagons and little dashboard icons, but there wasn't a lot of literature to buy. But I found a home in the little library was a three-block walk for my house. And I could disappear down the snowy valley of a book, and I was somewhere else. And so poetry saved my life. I mean, my best friends were poets. I think the way...”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been really blessed with a lot of outside help. I'm a big fan of the mental health professional and the librarians and English teachers and those kind souls you meet along the way.”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whatever I went through, a lot of people and people I grew up with and loved had it way worse and didn't make it. So I think I was haunted. I was a haunted little girl. I tried to kill myself when I was a kid, when I was still in grade school. I took a bunch of aspirin. It said pain relief. And I thought, okay, this is what I want. So I didn't have a choice. I was in some ways not having a choice was a lucky thing because I went into therapy very early. I managed to get after leaving school without a diploma. I managed to weasel my way into college and had a really kind professor. And his wife kind of took me under their wing and urged me to go into therapy when I was 19. And so I was sitting in rooms talking to codependent social workers starting when I was a kid. And all of that helped. But I guess.”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There we go. You know, I was a weird little kid, and I was just my mother was capital and nervous and married seven times, twice to my daddy. And both my parents drank hard. It was Texas. Everybody was armed. And we were allowed combative house. So I loved my parents. I mean, that's what I should say. I don't think anybody who's read anything I've written about them. Challenge that, but it was not a safe childhood. And yes, it had its fair share of blows. I mean, I always, you know, look, I was born in the richest country in the world. My skin color is something. The whole country privileges. I'm a college professor. I grew up skinny and my teeth came in relatively straight and I have a lot of advantages.”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Publishing is nothing compared to the writing, I think. Publishing for me was great because they gave me money and I didn't have any. So that was good. But yeah, I think I had a flamethrower on my ass. Can I say ass on your show?”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. Yes, no, that's it. And industrial, like a lot of oil refineries all around, so not Paris in the 20s, I guess is the way I would.”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This kitchen is in southeast Texas. It's a town that I write about to protect the mayor and the school principal and the people who didn't sign off on what I said about him. I call it Leachfield, but it's really east of Port Arthur, Texas, a small town in East Texas. I call it the ringworm belt.”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, right after my first memoir was published, we were having my mother's kitchen retiled. My sister and I were there. And that, yeah, and the tile dude, a prize off a tile and he holds it up and it has a little round toilet. And he looks at my little fluffy-haired gray-haired mother and says, Miss Card, this looks like a bullet hole. And my sister says, mom, isn't that where you shot at daddy? And she says, no, that's where I shot at Larry. Over there is where I shot at your daddy. So people ask me why I wanted to be a memoirist. I'm like, why would you make stuff up when that's who your mother is?”
2024-06-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT