It means spending a lot of time alone in a room. I have to find the story within the story, to write my way to what is most true. That sense of truth, of resonance is why the memoir form has become so popular, Karr believes. I think the form that reveals the most about a culture is the favored form. With memoir, there's an intimacy, a sense of emotional engagement.
People are lonely for each other.
If she remembers more than her friends do about that time, it's because she's worked at it. The process of memory for her involves filtering the past through the self she has become. Though Karr still thinks of Texas as home, she prefers to do her looking back from a distance. Now a professor of English at Syracuse University, she left home at 17. She and her druggie bunch of friends lit out for Los Angeles in 1972 in a cross-country adventure she thought meant she'd escaped her past.