There’s this idea of the tortured artist, or of a link
between depression and creativity—is that true and necessary? If so, how
do you make meaningful art after recovery, if you’re no longer
tortured?
Well, I don’t know, maybe you don’t. I’ve been
sober almost 25 years and anything anyone’s ever bought from me has been
written when I was sober. If I hadn’t been, I would’ve been like David,
swinging from a fucking noose. That really cuts down on your
creativity. [Laughs]
When was super depressed, I wasn’t
working—I was always too depressed. Hemingway did his best work when he
didn’t drink, then he drank himself to death and blew his head off with a
shotgun. Someone asked John Cheever, “What’d you learn from Hemingway?”
and he said “I learned not to blow my head off with a shotgun.”
....You’re
present when you’re not drinking a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every day.
It’s probably better for your writing career, you know? I think being
tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be
an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all
that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state.
When I’ve been that way, I’ve always been less exalted than I would
have liked.
....Blake said, “we are put on Earth a little space that we might learn to
bear the beams of love.” And I think, quote-unquote, “bearing the beams
of love” is where the freedom is, actually. Every drunk is an outlaw,
and certainly every artist is. Making amends, to me, is again about
freedom. I do that to be free of the past, to not be haunted.
- Mary Karr
descensus Averno facilis est