KARR
But with Lit, I faced such time pressure, I had to write lying down. If I sat up and typed with this injury, I’d last maybe six or seven hours. Lying down with my laptop on my knees, I could go from seven in the morning until eight or nine at night. I did that seven days a week. I felt like a Turkish pasha. I’d lie around in silk pajamas. And eat pistachios all day.
INTERVIEWER
Actual silk pajamas?
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KARR
People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.
INTERVIEWER
Was this a practice test?
KARR
No, it was the SAT itself—maybe the literature test. I just put my pencil down and started memorizing. Later I came across the poem in a library. It was “Storm Windows,” by Howard Nemerov. I wrote him a fan letter, to which he replied on Washington University stationery—it was like the Holy Grail, a note from a living poet. When I was twenty I met him at a reading he gave in the Twin Cities, and he said, You’re that little girl from Texas!
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