When I die, I’d like to have my commonplace books buried with me unless any of my kids wants to keep them. I don’t want them to go into uncaring hands because these words are my very life.
I spent almost nine hours last month copying quotes from Mary Karr’s memoir Lit. First I read Karr’s The Liars’ Club and liked it, but copied no quotes. Then I read Karr’s Cherry and liked it a little less than The Liars’ Club and again copied no quotes. Finally, I read Lit and loved it entirely and copied every little line that spoke to me. In a month’s time, I spent twenty-six sessions of twenty minutes each copying the words to capture the feelings to know myself better.
There is no good reason for this obsession to copy someone else’s words, which makes it a very good reason altogether. I do it because I love it. No one makes me. No one pays me. No one even cares. And what does this particular eight-plus hours add up to? A whole night’s sleep. Two and a half Taylor Swift concerts. Eight mornings of exercise. Sixteen ski sessions. A lot of reading to Sailor. But in fact, it’s simply this: that I now own for myself all the parts of Mary Karr’s story that intersect with my story.
Lit is about Mary Karr’s simultaneous journeys to sobriety and faith. It’s about trauma in childhood, her own motherhood, the breakdown of her marriage, the time she spent in a mental hospital, and how sober people and poetry saved her. It’s about learning to pray and what letting go means. She writes like Anne Lamott in places, which makes me double-love her.
As early as page forty (and my first twenty minutes spent copying), Karr was calling me into the beauty she had found and giving me words for what words have done for me: “define me, govern and determine me.”
She even says she was converted to the Church of Poetry (see heart below), which I basically have been too, except I still love being Anglican and going to Village every week. But certain poems are to me like sun, air, and food: I have to have them.
This handwriting of mine goes on for a solid twenty pages in the commonplace book, twenty pages that no one except my mom and I will ever read. I know Mary Karr isn’t my mom’s type of writer, so I told her she should just read what I copied. I also told her I would bequeath my commonplace books to her if it worked like that.
So it goes. And goes. And goes. And it means nothing except everything.
It means I am a person who loves words and who loves writers who love words.
It means I know firsthand that doing a little bit of something every day will eventually get you to the end.
It means exactly what I put on my quote board yesterday.
