Lit: A Memoir | Mary Karr | A harrowing pilgrimage toward the light

Lit: A Memoir | Mary Karr | Astonishingly good

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Caroline Aaron Tear Soup English Country Da... SCHUBERT 101: THE ... Lit: A Memoir

	Lit: A Memoir Mary Karr Harper, 2009 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 98 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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 harrowing pilgrimage toward the light

I have read Lit twice; the first time I inhaled the story, and the second I wanted to see how Karr did it. She's a master at making scenes (chapters typically begin with some authorial musing and summary, with visual snippets, before fading into a major scene that vividly renders experience and propels the narrative). And her mordant humor (a gift from her colorful mother, as were her literary ambitions) underscores the larger awareness that seems always to have been there. Poets write well, of course, and Karr has some interesting moves. Like sometimes starting sentences with a verb: "Fitful, this rest is." "Worried, I must have been, about . . ."; or the noun: "The child-abuse tour, she jokes it is, for my agenda is to double-check my words against . . ."

In Lit Karr looks back at herself from the vantage point of twenty years of sobriety; we know she's in a safe place and so can enjoy her harrowing pilgrimage. I don't envy Karr her material, however plucky her voice and chipper her attitude as she stares into the abyss--but my gosh what a delicious book this is. This tale also is tolerable because of Karr's considerable gifts as a writer but, really, in the end, because she's the story's hero--we root for Karr, her own worst enemy--and she rises. She learns to live with herself by managing herself. Prayer, the ancient answer, did it, not her years of therapy, which did help keep her alive for a couple decades.

Lit begins to achieve its lasting greatness as Karr documents how, kicking and cursing, the canny, heartbroken little atheist became the humbled soul who got religion. For a writer of her gifts to document such a thing is rare. And I wish she'd said even more--revealing her conception of God, if she has one; one AA buddy told her she prays to the sane part of herself--the kingdom of heaven indeed within. In understandable deference to her large audience, assumed to be unbelievers, Karr herself holds back. She may be too concerned about their feelings, but her trying to explain faith to the secular world without seeming sappy or preachy gives Lit a nice tension.

Even today, one senses, her path wasn't forever smoothed. Her equanimity takes a daily spiritual discipline. In a powerful summation regarding an unhappy childhood's legacy, Karr indicates she feels doomed to a species of fragility and suffering:

"When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function as an adult, but add in the right proportions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place."

I'm amazed by Karr's accomplishment as a writer and moved by her journey as a human. Lit is a great book that proves memoir can be literature.

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Astonishingly good

Mary Karr's memoirs and poetry are so astonishingly good I fantasize spending a day inside her head. I suspect she'd say 'You don't want to be there' but I'd feel a moment of grace to experience her giftedness.

Poetic Introspection

Mary Karr's poetic reflections on her life and struggles is bold, funny, unsentimental, brutal, sad, enlightening and whip-smart all at once. I'm sure it's possible to read this without reading "The Liar's Club" first, but I'd recommend devouring Karr's first memoir before this one. You're probably going to end up reading it, anyway, to learn more about Karr's quirky (to put it mildly) upbringing. There are plenty of references in "Lit" to what happened in her youth, but you'll have much more detail to work with. ("Lit" does include a brief recap to "The Liar's Club" and there are a few references to the people and stories in "Cherry." But you don't need to read "Cherry," about Karr's coming-of-age years, to enjoy this.)

The brilliance here is in the insight. No, it's the honesty. No, it's the humor. Maybe it's in the ability to break down moments, the ability to dig down deep in your own muck and mistakes and try to understand (and explain) how you came so unglued. And maybe it's in the ability to look back without any hint of self-pity. At first, things seem fine. Karr finds a fellow writer and poet from a wealthier background. "Like any traveler from a ruined land, I try to adapt to the new customs, part of some ineffable mystery that compromises the man whose photo I carry in my wallet like an amulet against the squalor I was born to. I yearn for transformation, and Warren is its catalyst. What I don't understand, I try to yield to, though I'm genetically disinclined to follow instruction."

The arc of "Lit" is a swirling, sloshed-out ride to the bottom of the bottle and a slow, struggle back through therapy and coaching and prayer--religion, in this case Christianity--to becoming a functioning member of society, an artist. The plot you may have read many times, it's unlikely you have heard this tale through the eyes of an introspective poet. It's unlikely you'll root as hard for anyone else as you do for Karr as she climbs up, slips, falls, and climbs up again. Karr is dead clear about her reliance on outside help to get through the dark days and she keeps pulling you along with sharp writing. "The further I get from the rainy night my car skidded sideways on my last drunk, the bleaker the outlook of toppling back into the tar I've just slithered out of. A beer has come to seem like a bullet in a gun's chamber. But the occasional urge for icy oblivion can still tear through me with brute longing."

Karr approaches religion with mountains of skepticism, but clearly shows us how she grew to understand and appreciate its comfort and supports. (Nothing comes close to pushiness on this topic, however.)

As the book came toward the end, I found myself reading slower and slower, not wanting it to end and trying to savor each moment. There is a moment in the hospital where Karr's mother is dying that is laugh-out-loud hilarious and makes even more sense if you've gotten to know Karr's mother through "The Liar's Club." (Karr's mother is one of the wackiest real-life characters you'll ever meet.) The last few morsels of insight are brilliant, sweet, touching and hopeful. "Lit" is about escaping and coming all the way back. You're glad Mary Karr made it back from the depths to tell this tale.

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Very thought provoking

I loved 'The Liars' Club and 'Cherry', and 'Lit' follows along with almost the same degree of captivating writing as the two prior two books.

Mary Karr is clearly a superb writer, but what really got me on this book was the deep introspection and honesty toward herself. It can't have been easy to plumb the depths of her own past failings, put them to paper, and let them out for the entire world to see. In addition, in some ways this book is almost a self-help book, even for those who don't battle alcohol and drug addiction. My new favorite thought, gleaned from this book, is 'what is your source of information'.

I was warned by many that this book was dark and grim, but I didn't see it that way at all. I thought it was a very hopeful and encouraging story. Let's face it, it would have been easier for Mary Karr to descend into alcoholism and stay there permanently. What she achieved and accomplished was infinitely more brave.

The only thing keeping this book from five stars for me was that at times the writing was a bit too over-done and some parts went on longer than they needed to. Otherwise, an excellent read.

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One long screech of pain

Well, now I know what happened to all the emotion I didn't hear in Mary Karr's voice in The Liars' Club, the story of her blighted childhood. She stuffed it all down until adulthood. This book is one long screech of pain.

To me, this Mary Karr is more genuine than the author of Liar's Club. That memoir was very stylized -- down-home Texas tall tale, outsized, but to me, antiseptic. In Lit, Mary Karr emotes. She italicizes, she all-caps, she streams exclamation points. She hisses, she claws, she swigs. And she swears... a lot.

That's okay by me. Her descent into alcoholism is finely observed. She feels the neverending pull of drink: "These powerful urges are close to complete madness, the old drunk self so fully occupying my body, it's like being possessed." And hooray for a writer who doesn't flinch at honestly recounting the train wreck that is new motherhood -- she titles one chapter Postal Partum. "A doubled cough punctures my head like two shots from a nail gun," she writes about being wakened by her son's midnight coughing.

I would have been completely besotted by this book if it weren't for two things. One, the style was too, too twee, with several recurring annoyances: "We loved each other this way, Daddy and I, from afar." It's poetic the first time but after the hundredth time, I just want to read "Daddy and I loved each other from afar." The other authorial tic that bugged me was an odd use of the word "which": "But I saw the shine in Mother's eyes as that opera washed over her. Which music Daddy cared diddly for." Over and over and over again.

The second caveat is more general. In the last third of the book, Karr undergoes a spiritual awakening. Its gradual nature and her resistance was the best part of the book, as far as I'm concerned. What I didn't like is that to prove something, to prove her "street cred," I guess, Karr must have felt she had to be more raw, use more profanity, swagger more. I guess she doesn't want the "wuss" label now that she espouses a belief. I hope she can overcome that posturing at some point. It creates the same remoteness I felt in Liar's Club, although this time it's not therapy or creative writing courses that create the distance, it's religion.

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