Lit: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Mary Karr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 3, 2009

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Product Description

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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Photos from Mary Karr
(Click to Enlarge)

Mary's much adored oil-worker Daddy	Mary's artist mother, Charlie Karr	Mary, at 22, meeting poet Howard Nemerov	Mary one month before visiting the "Mental Marriott"

Mary, age 17, with sister Lecia, age 19	Mary and young son Dev	Mary with family before her Leitchfield Liars' Club reading	Mary celebrating the holidays with son Dev	Mary's son, Dev Milburn, in 2009

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From Bookmarks Magazine

Reviewers agreed that while Karr's memoir could have succumbed to the pitfalls of the addiction-recovery memoir, it rises above the genre. Juicy, evocative, confessional, poetic, and often darkly humorous, Lit recounts Karr's dark past in an intimate, easy style. While critics considered Lit a seamless addition to her previous memoirs, some expressed surprise that it takes a religious turn. A few also commented that the memoir is tamer and less dramatic than Liar's Club and that it contains some abstract sections about Karr's relationships. But in the end, Karr—one of our finest memoirists—remains "unswerving in her determination to face the past and, if possible, transcend it" (San Francisco Chronicle).

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Harper; First edition (November 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060596988
• ISBN-13: 978-0060596989
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (157 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #146,118 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mary Karr's first memoir, The Liar's Club, kick-started a memoir revolution and won nonfiction prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, it rode high on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, becoming an annual "best book" there and for The New Yorker, People, and Time. Recently Entertainment Weekly rated it number four in the top one hundred books of the past twenty-five years. Her second memoir, Cherry, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, also hit bestseller and "notable book" lists at the New York Times and dozens of other papers nationwide. Her most recent book in this autobiographical series, Lit: A Memoir, is the story of her alcoholism, recovery, and conversion to Catholicism. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays. Other grants include the Whiting Award and Radcliffe's Bunting Fellowship. She is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

123 of 132 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Happened After "The Liar's Club" and "Cherry", October 24, 2009

By 

C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lit: A Memoir (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Mary Karr is an awesome writer and "Lit" just became one of my top 50 books of all time. The first 100+ pages are harrowing as Ms. Karr describes her long self-destructive slide into alcoholism (just like her parents). These pages are hard to take, just like watching a car wreck in slow motion. However her brutal honesty and her gallows humor about her road to redemption and sobriety save this memoir from being another AA recovery tale. She writes of her self-centered, off-center mother and a childhood from hell with the ring of truth. The heart of the memoir is family : grieving for her father (who, she perceived to win "the better parent prize" because he didn't stand over her with a butcher knife), figuring out her relationship with her now sober but still off the wall mother, and exploring the past with her big sister. This book is not for everyone because Ms. Karr's early life was messy and uncomfortable. But she writes like she is having a conversation with the reader and she is a master story-teller.

58 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Memoir I've Read Since "The Liar's Club", October 26, 2009

By 

Marion "[e-mail]" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Lit: A Memoir (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

I have to admit that Ms. Karr's "The Liars' Club: A Memoir" is one of my favorite books of all time. Memoirs are one of my favorite genres and being able to see behind the scenes in the life of a poet/writer is intriguing. I enjoyed reading "Cherry" and was thrilled when I saw that Ms. Karr had "Lit" coming out, taking up where "Cherry" left off. What I enjoyed most about this book was her lyrical, moving language and her fierce honesty. This couldn't have been an easy book to write because she holds nothing back and is brutally candid about her alcoholism and how it almost destroyed her, but more importantly, how she overcame her inner demons to find sobriety and success. She has several stories about her experiences in AA that had me either rolling with laughter or crying. The story about the woman, the frozen turkey and the vodka was side-splitting funny. I won't share the details because you need to buy the book and read it for yourself. It's overflowing with wit, humor, love, angst and wisdom.

Each chapter begins with a quote, most from poems, (and a few from some literary masterpieces) and I've discovered some amazing new poets from them. I've highlighted and dog-eared pages to refer back to in nearly every chapter. I like that she included a 'Contents' page and titled each of the 45 short chapters. The book is divided into four major sections:

I. Escape From The Tropic of Squalor
II. Flashdance
III. Self Help
IV. Being Who You Are Is Not A Disorder

Ultimately, this is a dazzling tale of redemption, liberation, grace and survival. By all accounts, Mary Karr should not have survived her hardscrabble life, but thank God she did because we are all richer for her life and her stories.

I also highly recommend her poetry, "Viper Rum (Poets, Penguin)", Sinners Welcome: Poems", "Abacus", and "The Devil's Tour".

Thank you, Ms. Karr, from the bottom of my bookaholic, poet-heart, for having the guts to share your incredible, extraordinary journey with us.

101 of 117 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I can't *believe* I'm saying this..., November 11, 2009

By 

porkchop (Richmond, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lit: A Memoir (Hardcover)

...but I didn't love this book. I am a big fan of her other books. I've read Liar's Club so many times it's all soft and worn down at the corners. In fact, if anyone else had written Lit, I would probably give it 4 stars because it's beautifully written and full of fantastic insights, both large and small.

Lit blends a recovery story with a religious conversion experience, against the background of the rest of her life (family, writing, academics). I wasn't right there with her all the time. The story was so permeated with alcoholism that everything else got cut off at the knees. I wanted more slices of life to let me know what she was missing, more humor to frame the sadness, more high times, more *characters*. Her husband Warren wasn't half the person he should have been. She didn't write about him with her usual fearlessness--I don't know why. If she was protecting him as a person, she cheated him as a character.

The connection between recovery and faith was a little forced. She's on such firm ground with vice and self-indulgence...I don't think she was able to downshift far enough to churn through her own naivete about grace. The work of explaining it showed, and for the last 100 pages she didn't seem to have her usual grip on what she was saying. The fact of that was touching in its own way, but there wasn't enough substance to her conversion.

There was plenty of honesty here (not surprising) but not enough truth.