---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Barrie Karp <barriekarp@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 7:13 PM
Subject: SIGHTING - Mary Karr interview mentions Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Lolita.
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu>

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5992/the-art-of-memoir-no-1-mary-karr

from  Interviews - Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir No. 1, Interviewed by Amanda Fortini

"Toby nudged me to read Harry Crews’s A Childhood. I also read Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory."

"Looking at an early draft of Cherry, I said to myself, Oh my God, you’re superimposing a forty-year-old woman’s libido on a twelve-year-old girl. It seemed perverse. Like it’d inspire pedophiles to think that every young girl was Lolita. Eventually I realized I’d misrepresented the experience. A twelve-year-old writing a boy’s name on her notebook over and over doesn’t want to get boffed into guacamole. She wants the boy to bring her a valentine and put it in her lunch box."

Barrie Karp