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Book Review And Bookpeople Reading: Mary Karr's Lit
Longtime fans of Mary Karr’s frank, acerbic, and rather beautiful prose may be feeling a bit of shock—maybe even betrayal—by the content of her latest book. Karr’s third in a line of intelligent and delightfully profane memoirs, Lit is her story of motherhood, alcoholism, divorce, recovery, and, quite surprisingly, her conversion to Catholicism (a bit of a trend lately, it seems). For those who know Karr for her poetry as well, 2006’s Sinners Welcome, is as confessional as any of her nonfiction, tipped us off. And while her faith has certainly been no secret, the message boards are lighting up nonetheless. Laments lorikay4, if Mary Karr isn’t “constitutionally incapable of religion, then I don't know anything.”
Luckily Karr has succeeded in making Lit just as readable for a secular audience as her previous volumes. In an interview with Terry Gross, Karr herself compares her earliest drafts as a recent convert to the rhetoric of late-night televangelists—an interesting comparison considering how readily she admits to doing it all for the money. But through great care and diligent editing, the final product is thankfully more Anne Lamott than Joel Osteen.
While her poetic prowess is unavoidably on display in every sentence, she simultaneously manages a conversational ease free of the tragic sentimentality one comes to expect from religious and recovery narratives. It is strangely and casually intimate in places. Karr is quick to parenthetically address the reader—to reprimand her younger self, confess spots and biases in her memory, or catch up those not familiar with the bizarre childhood in East Texas (chronicled in The Liar’s Club), a product of her mother’s severe mental illness and substance abuse.
She is, rather strikingly, completely unafraid. It’s obvious from the first page that Karr wrote this book with advice given to her by Tobias Wolff at the front of her mind: “Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity.” She acknowledges right away (on page 2, no less) in an open letter to her grown son, Dev, the similarities between the evolution of her addiction and depression and that of her mother. The realization is, of course, tremendously unsettling but what follows is a pretty fascinating study of her own family and history, the patterns that emerge as the life she sought apart from them begins to unravel, and the inch-by-inch, nails-in-the-dirt, dragging toward God she experiences in the process. “Drinking to handle the angst of Mother’s drinking—caused by her own angst—” she writes, “means our twin dipsomanias face off like a pair of mirrors, one generation offloading misery to the other through dwindling generations, back through history to when humans first fermented grapes.”
Mary Karr will be reading from Lit and signing copies at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 12 at BookPeople.
