Ratings5
Average rating4.2
The Liars' Club brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood. Cherry, her account of her adolescence, "continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal" (Entertainment Weekly). Now Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness-and to her astonishing resurrection.Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott," with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, "Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!" has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity.Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up-as only Mary Karr can tell it.
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A really great read. Mary Karr doesn't spare herself as she writes about her descent into alcoholism and her long crawl to sobriety, but she does take every opportunity to highlight any humor there was to be found in her situation (sometimes very dark humor indeed).
Her sharp but affectionate treatment of AA meetings reminded me of some of David Foster Wallace's descriptions of the program in Infinite Jest, where the characters hilariously acknowledge that the behavior that is being asked of them is absurd, undignified, embarrassing, they don't want to do it, but they do it anyway because they know it is saving their lives. Then a bandanna wearing David Foster Wallace made his appearance in Karr's memoir, and I thought, “of course.” The two met in AA.
Mary Karr's struggle for sobriety is entwined with her spiritual journey to Christianity, and as an adult convert I was especially interested in that part of the story. She's very matter of fact about her scepticism and her reasons for getting baptised in the Catholic church (her kid was getting baptised, she liked the particular church they had found), but then once she had committed herself she jumped in with both feet, undertaking the spiritual exercises of Ignatius under the direction of a nun.
From this memoir I learned that Mary Karr is one tough, funny woman who is becoming more loving through grace and the help of an impressive array of people who love her.
Two memoirs. One poetry book. One writing book. Yes, it was a Mary Karr week.
My Mary Karr reading frenzy all started quite innocently. I took a writing class last summer at Inprint in Houston. Our teacher told us Mary Karr was coming to Houston in September. I spontaneously decided to buy a ticket, vaguely remembering that I'd read her first memoir, Liar's Club, back twenty years ago or so. When the date of Karr's reading approached, I was exhausted by all the beginning-of-the-year stuff we teachers experience but I remembered a book was included in the price of the reading, and I didn't want to miss out on picking up that book. So I reluctantly decided to go. When I googled the address of the reading, I was surprised to see that it was being held in a church. Must not have been able to book the Wortham for that night, I thought.
I was wrong. It was no accident that Mary Karr was at Christ Church Cathedral, an Episcopal Church in downtown Houston, built in 1839; all her readings were being held in churches.
I was intrigued. An author in a church. Imagine that.
Mary Karr was fascinating. “I was a strange child,” she told her audience at the reading. “I was not a happy child. But there was something about reading memoirs that made me feel less lonely.” Karr shared her new book, The Art of Memoir, and suggested that through our stories we manufacture a self. “Writing a memoir is like knocking yourself out with your own fist,” she told us.
All her books, Karr explained, could be summed up: “I am sad. The end.”
In her life, Karr survived her alcoholic and dysfunctional parents to become an alcoholic and dysfunctional parent herself. And somehow she broke free of all that, mysteriously embracing both writing and the Catholic Church.
Mary Karr is a little older, a little less functional Texas-rooted me. Like me, she has both the redneck-storytelling people and the salvation-through-reading people in her family tree.
That was enough. I raced home from the reading and put everything I could find of Mary Karr's on hold at the library. I was amazed to find that not only were all three of her memoirs at the library, but that I could also check out and read one of her books of poetry.
I'll just tell you that her books are mostly “I am sad.” But, happily, there is a little more there before “The end.”
Beautiful writing. Sad stories. And redemption. Mary Karr.
I listened to Mary read this book and didn't think I would love it. But, when I finished, I ordered a hard copy because her poetic use of language is something to be appreciated and pondered and maybe even highlighted.
This is a story of recovery and finding a higher power. More than that though, it was about forgiveness. Forgiving her mother (we met her in The Liar's Club and forgiving seemed a big ask!), and forgiving herself. She starts the book with her writing career and her beginnings as a poet, her love affair with her husband, and the drink. Then she sorts herself out in the way of detangling a rope left under a bench–one knot at a time.
I didn't expect to like this as much as I did or be moved by the poetry she shares. Such a heart-tugging story makes reminds me that being vulnerable in writing is not being weak.
“How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.”