Mary Karr, author of The Liar’s Club and Cherry, comes out swinging again with her latest memoir, Lit. Her Texas shit-kicking style shines through as usual, but she’s tempered it this time with a serene wisdom born of her sobriety and conversion to Catholicism.
Mary’s told us quite a bit about her family in the past – father, mother and sister – but in Lit, we get to hear about the next generation in the form of her son Dev. He’s a young child for most of the book, but in the beginning he makes an appearance as a college student. Mary, who’s told us painful childhood stories of her alcoholic parents, now faces herself in that same role.
The memoir chronicles Mary’s journey from an out-of-place 17 year-old Texan at Macalester College (unnamed in the book) to literature professor at Syracuse University. Along the way she works as a financial consultant, gets an MFA, marries and divorces a Harvard blueblood, has a child, loses herself in alcohol and finds redemption in sobriety and prayer. Lit doesn’t strike as too self-indulgent though, partly due to Mary’s sometimes strange, always interesting acquaintances. The woman who drinks vodka from a frozen turkey, crystal meth Sam and former boyfriend David Foster Wallace, for example.
Lit’s characters are painstakingly drawn portraits of people in possession of both good and evil, though it would have been easy to leave out the good in some (like her mother, who infamously threatened to kill Mary and sister Lecia in their childhood). At the beginning of the memoir she writes, “Any way I tell this story is a lie,” due to the shoddy nature of memory’s film. She encounters many instances where she can’t remember critical details, particularly during her alcoholism, yet she draws other scenes in magnified detail, often enhanced by her sharp similes and metaphors: “From the second I haul my bag up the curved stair, the place drains me of force like a battery going to rust.” “The edges of the road have softened, the trees are giant scrambles of green fuzz.”
Many memoirs about getting sober and finding God, in fact most, come off as preachy, contrived. Not this one. Mary has produced a truly literary piece of recovery non-fiction with all the vim and wit worthy of her previous work. (A few pages at the beginning seem to be lifted directly from Cherry, which is questionable, but they fit seamlessly into the narrative.) The end of the memoir begins to drag with reflection brought on by her increasing interest in and devotion to Catholicism: “The spiritual lens – even just the nightly gratitude list and going over each day’s actions – is starting to rewrite the story of my life in the present, and I begin to feel like somebody snatched out of the fire, salvaged, saved.” The notion of being saved feels trite; but Mary is aware of the clichés inherent in the language of religion, and she takes pains to clearly outline the memoir as her story, not a cautionary tale or a call for believers. You can take her religion or leave it, but it never feels forced.
There was a recent uproar over Lit’s absence from Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 Books of the Year list, and in fact, a total absence of women writers. Frankly, it matters little who made “the list” in 2009 – Lit stands on its own as a searing and soulful work of non-fiction, an undeniable force to be reckoned with in memoir territory.
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1 comment
jan says:
Feb 10, 2010
Makes me want to go out in this blizzard and get just this book while being out of everything but Grapenuts