Maryann Burk CarverI met Maryann about 7 years ago when I went to a 4th of July party near Blaine Washington with my friend and landlord David Danee. ( Maryann stayed at David's lake home on Lummi Island for many years writing this story). I remember hanging out with Maryann, stuffing her broken computer into the back of her car all laid out on pillows to take it into Bellingham to have it repaired so she could continue writing her memoirs of her marriage to Raymond Carver. I was so surprised because I had read Carver and never imagined, of course, that I'd hear about these stories first hand.
I was lucky to have had a chance to read some of her manuscript. It was immediately engaging. Her character development was delightful. I was excited about this book, and I have been awaiting it's publication for many years. Her style of writing warmed my heart and drew me into her youthful life. Maryann, speaks poignantly about hers and Ray's lives as kids, their youthful dreams and aspirations. In that respect it is my story , too, for I also had dreams and wanted to create a good life, had children early on and relate to their youthful lives and the romance of it all.
Maryann and Son Vance at her signing in Seattle last night
( Vance is also writing his book about his life growing up with parents Raymond and Maryann Carver)
As a person who has always studied and appreciated literature, and has a special fondness for the story, this story of a budding writer (Ray) who created a pathway for short story writers today is revealing and sweet as Maryann speaks to their innocence and development. It is truly a beautiful story! Maryann has perservered through raising children, grandchildren, and now great grandchildren to write this charming book. Now, it is out and the reviews are splendid.
It was like always seeing Maryann again, Such a gracious woman, all smiles, and warmly greeting everyone, and sparkling when she read from her book, and speaking about her life with Raymond Carver, and their lives together that began so very early in her life with their meeting at the Spudnut shop.
I have many fond memories listening to Maryann telling me about her life with Ray, one in particular comes to mind, besides the Spudnut shop, and that is him holding her, "big' feet.
All her life long, beginning when they were kids, he held her feet when they were together, ( the first time she said she was so embarrassed, and as kids, we were embarrassed about things like our feet ). It is such a touching story because it resonates with all of us. Even up until those years just before his death, when he visited at Christmas to see the kids and her, and to bring gifts, Ray held Maryann's feet in his lap. Undoubtedly this is one of those love stories of a lifetime, even though they parted ways. It is obvious Ray always loved Maryann. I have read some of his later stories, and I know he is writing about Maryann, so warmly, affectionately.
For me, it is refreshing, that even though they went separate ways, he never stopped loving her, or her him, their early lives so intertwined, and a testament that love never does die!
As Maryann said last night at her signing, "this book is about all of us, because it is about the times we all went through together." Referring historical events and immense cultural changes.
Maryann and me at her signing last night.
Maryann Burk Carver, author of What it Used to Be Like (St. Martins)
Mary Ann Carver Thursday July 27th at 3rd Place books in SeattleA modern master of the short story, Raymond Carver's work is an inspiration to generations of writers, and this reflection by his wife of 25 years began, as Maryann Burk Carver tells it, in 1972, when he gave her one of his sharpened pencils and bade her to write an account of their history. This memoir of a marriage also brings to light the "stories behind the stories" of this brilliant writer.
Amazon.com link to Maryann's book What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver (Hardcover (Cloth))
by Carver, Maryann Burk
A few reviews:
Friday, July 21, 2006
A life spent in love with Raymond Carver is captured in memoir's intimate moments
Maryann Carver, by Scott Driscoll, Seattle PI
excerpt: Writing a memoir about life with a literary giant carries a risk: The reader may dip in for news of the writer and skim the rest. That would be a huge mistake with Maryann Burk Carver's portrait of her marriage to the late celebrated short-story writer Raymond Carver. "What It Used To Be Like" (St. Martin's Press, 341 pages, $25.95) is a heartbreaking, but bravely told, love story.
A life spent in love with Raymond Carver is captured in memoir's intimate moments:
"There's only so much cause and effect you can untangle in anyone's life," writes Carver. "So much of life is of a moment." What she delivers is a feast of moments from a tumultuous 27-year marriage.
Reached by phone in Birch Bay, where she lives in a condo while waiting to build a cabin on her family's homestead property, Carver admits it took her 35 years to write this book.
Divided into four decades... “A bittersweet account of the author’s hardscrabble life with her husband, the writer Raymond Carver. Divided into four decades, this memoir opens with her and her future husband’s first meeting in 1955-she was 14 at the time-and moves on to their secret engagement, their marriage in 1957 and the births of their two children in 1957 and 1958. With a husband in college and two small children to raise, Maryann shelved her plans to become a lawyer and took on the task of ensuring that Carver would hone his talents as a writer. Their young family, she says, was not a burden on Carver, but rather his anchor, and it does seem that she supported him for years, while the circumstances they found themselves in gave the writer material for many of his gritty, realistic stories. In Sacramento, they lived for years on the edge of poverty, she as a waitress and he in mostly menial jobs while he slowly worked his way through college. The ’60s brought Carver some recognition, but his youthful optimism was fading, as stability and economic security eluded his family. They were constantly on the move, with Carver never content and Maryann struggling to get her own college degree.
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Jonathan Yardley reviews Maryann Burk Carver's What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver:
Maryann Burk Carver's What It Used to Be Like Cynics will insist that this is a woman trying to claim a larger role in her famous husband's life than she actually enjoyed, but the facts strongly suggest the contrary. Maryann was there when Ray needed her, often to the sacrifice of her own desires and ambitions, and she's fully entitled to claim her place in the making of Carver's career and reputation. In the good times he gave her a lot of love, which seems to have been heartfelt, and at some level he seems to have understood how indispensable she was to him. But he must have been a dreadfully difficult person to live with, not just because of the booze and the infidelities and the abuse, but because he was wholly self-absorbed. He'd been spoiled as a boy by a doting mother and ever after believed that the world owed him a living; he was scarcely the first writer to see himself in that light, but that didn't make it any easier to be his wife or his child.
When fame finally came to him -- fame, that is, in the tiny, hermetic world of American literary fiction and its great sideshow, the lecture-and-workshop circuit -- Maryann didn't much like what it turned him into: "the Important American Writer." It is easy to imagine how insufferable he must have been, with his panel discussions and his fellowships and his grants and his acolytes, but that's not why the marriage ended: ....
Raymond Carver's wife of twenty-five years powerfully reveals the evolution of their lives together as Carver rose to prominence as one of the greatest American writers in the twentieth century.
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Maryann Carver begins by recalling her ardent courtship by young Raymond Carver in the early 1950s in a little town south of Yakima, Wash. Not yet 15, she was working as a waitress in a doughnut shop. "A tall, dark curly-haired young man walked in," she recalls. "Ray was as handsome and sophisticated as a guy in a TV ad." Their first date was a double feature at the local drive-in with "Blackboard Jungle" at the top of the bill. "Who needed to read romance magazines? This was the real thing," she writes. So real, in fact, that the young couple eventually "crossed the line," as she puts it, and when she found herself pregnant at 16, the 19-year-old Carver married her.
Raymond Carver
View From Mt Adams at dawn (C) Sherry Stewart 2004
Storm at Ivars in Mukilteo (c) Sherry Stewart
Maryann Burk Carver
