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In the beginning, when there are zero pages, you have to cheer yourself into cranking stuff out, even if it later lands on the cutting room floor. Each page takes you somewhere you need to travel before you can land in the next spot. You zigzag, and in the low moments, you just have to keep plodding on—saying the next small thing about which you feel strongly, trying to nestle down into that single instant of clear memory you know without shadow of doubt is both true and important to who you’ve become.
The Art of Memoir
Mary Karr
The memory brought a stab of pain almost physical—I’d avoided writing about how in love we were, brimming with hope. It had been far easier to make glib, jokey remarks about how shitty a wife I’d been. Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off. If you find yourself blocked for a period, maybe goad yourself in the direction of how you hoped at the time.
The Art of Memoir
Mary Karr
The President wrote his ambassador to Italy that Americans “are going through a bad case of Huey Long and Father Coughlin influenza—the whole country is aching in every body.” That included Roosevelt. Like the radio priest, Huey had supported Roosevelt in 1932. (Unlike Coughlin, the Kingfish could rightly claim that FDR couldn’t have been nominated without him.) Now he was angry at the entire New Deal. His income tax returns were being questioned, Farley was withholding federal patronage from him, and WPA projects in Louisiana had been suspended because of irregularities in local administration. The Kingfish’s chief grievance, however, was that he wasn’t President, and he felt he ought to be. He wrote a book, My First Days in the White House. (Roosevelt, he wrote, would be his Secretary of the Navy.) Asked if there would be a Long-for-President movement in 1936, he snapped, “Sure to be. And I think we will sweep the country.” One of the few men on Capitol Hill to stare Huey down was Harry S. Truman. The obscure Missourian was carrying out one of the traditional chores of freshman senators, presiding over the Senate, when Long delivered one of his more venomous speeches. Afterward the Kingfish asked him what he thought of it. Truman answered sharply, “I had to listen to you because I was in the chair and couldn’t walk out.” But as the New Deal approached its second anniversary there were fewer and fewer Trumans. Huey was openly ridiculing the President on the Senate floor as “a liar and a faker,” and it is a measure of Roosevelt’s desperation that he was driven to solicit support from Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, the most noisome racist in the South. Bilbo scorched “that madman Huey Long,” but all he achieved was to attract a tornado of angry mail from his own constituents.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
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