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Mary Karr

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Lit : A Memoir (P.S. Book 3) Kindle Edition

by Mary Karr (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 1,428 ratings

Book 3 of 3: The Liars' Club

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A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

New York Times Book Review • The New Yorker • Entertainment Weekly • Time • Washington Post • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Christian Science Monitor • Slate • St. Louise Post-Dispatch • Cleveland Plain Dealer • Seattle Times • NBCC Award Finalist

Mary Karr’s unforgettable sequel to her beloved and bestselling memoirs The Liars’ Club and Cherry “lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times).

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.

The Boston Globe calls Lit a book that “reminds us not only how compelling personal stories can be, but how, in the hands of a master, they can transmute into the highest art." The New York Times Book Review calls it “a master class on the art of the memoir” and Susan Cheever states, simply, that Lit is “the best book about being a woman in America I have read in years."

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.

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

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Karr performs her brave memoir about alcoholism, getting sober, and getting God in a confident Texas drawl. Readers familiar with The Liar's Club, Karr's account of her childhood will find parallels--her descent into alcoholism differs from her mother's addiction only in the details. Karr revisits her past with rare candor and humor, recounting her role in the disintegration of her marriage to Warren Whitbread, the reserved scion of a fabulously wealthy family (whose other members are deliciously skewered here), and her most shameful moments (leaving her feverish toddler to take a long swig from the bottle of Jack Daniels stashed in the oven). When Karr undergoes a hard-won spiritual awakening through the combined efforts of AA; her spiritual director, Joan the Bone; and a stay in the Mental Marriott, listeners will be cheering. A Harper hardcover.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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).

Review

“With this third book Karr has managed to raise the bar higher still on the genre of memoir.”

From the Inside Flap

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.

--Pam Houston, O Magazine

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

Mary Karr is a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays, and is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. Her previous two memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry, were New York Times bestsellers.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Valerie Sayers The poet Mary Karr has produced three provocatively titled memoirs -- "The Liars' Club," "Cherry" and now "Lit" -- to tell her life story, or at least her story up to the point when she published the first installment in 1995. With every new book, she must win over resistant memoirphobes like me: readers who dread the depiction of yet another horrific (if colorful) childhood, drug-addled adolescence, young adult breakdown and especially -- most especially -- blissful spiritual recovery. It's not that the lives revealed in so many memoirs are unworthy of examination; it's not even that they're necessarily Too Much Information, that bane of our hyper-therapized culture. It is, rather, that the pronoun "I" can function as a semiautomatic weapon in the hands of a memoirist: Whoever has possession controls the conversation. Karr's sharp and funny sensibility won me over to her previous two volumes, but what wins me over to "Lit" is the way her acute self-awareness conquers any hint that hers is the only version of this story. The verbal tics of the earlier narratives -- the folksy, earthy Texas-talk of "The Liars' Club" and the stark second-person self-address of "Cherry" -- charmed the many fans who made both books bestsellers, but here she mostly eschews such seductive flourishes for frank acknowledgments about the ways she controls this tale: She says, for example, that her ex-husband has declined a chance to review these pages and admits that this would be quite a different story told from his perspective. By the time she came to write "Lit," Karr had long since undergone a religious conversion to Roman Catholicism, and she has a new set of models for autobiography, including Saint Augustine and Thomas Merton. Her ongoing exercises in self-examination (she undertakes, among other practices, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius) bring a heightened sense of her obligations to the family and friends revealed in these pages, but also to herself. Her willingness to write about her conversion owes a good deal to Merton's example of simplicity and directness, but she acknowledges what a dubious choice religion will seem to many contemporary nonbelievers (especially fellow writers). Even her oil-worker father raised her to believe the old saw that "church is a trick on poor people." Before she found herself in a pew, however, Karr found herself in an alcoholic stupor. So much of this narrative is devoted to drunkenness that it could just as easily be titled "Sauce" or "Hooch." "Lit" picks up where "Cherry" left off, but Karr does such a good job of summarizing the high and low points of her early life that it would be perfectly satisfying for a reader to begin here. We follow her through her adolescent, drug-informed wandering from Texas to California, her strained college days, and the tentative beginnings of her life as graduate student and poet. Apt and generous epigraphs from other writers grace each chapter, and the interplay between their influence and Karr's development as a writer is intriguing. Indeed, Karr's intellectual life is a strong and engaging story; at many points it's a rope to cling to as the reader rides out the stormy emotionalism of her early adulthood. She meticulously charts the disintegration of her marriage to a man she portrays as emotionally buttoned-down, to say the least. If her portrait of him and his wealthy family is unsparing, it is her own part in their mutual destruction that most horrifies her. The couple's financial struggles are interlaced with glimpses of her in-laws' old money, and it is easy to understand why her resentment festered, given her own precarious upbringing. Certainly, money could have eased the couple's struggle, but there is no suggestion that money alone would have saved them. As she flailed through the early years of motherhood, Karr was hellbent on following the path blazed years before by her flamboyant, alcoholic mother, a pistol-toting artist. Just as her terrifying maternal model began drying out and gaining a degree of sanity, Karr began her worst descent. Alcoholics' stories can usually be summed up pretty neatly with a single adjective -- in a memoir with a chapter called "A Short History of My Stupidity," stupefying will do. But as with all stories that surprise us, the specificity of the account gives it its punch. Karr alternates droll anecdotes of other drunks (one swigs vodka hidden in a frozen turkey) with her own slow awareness that she, too, is out of control. If the first two volumes of her memoirs strutted, this one proceeds more modestly: Karr is full of regret, but she's also as funny as ever on the subject of her own sinning. Although these pages sometimes strain for effect (I'm not a big fan of cute phrases like "horse dookey" or the direct addresses to her now-grown son), the language often captures, precisely, the tension between the intellectual and the emotional, the artistic and the spiritual. This is a story not just of alcoholism but of coming to terms with families past and present, with a needy self, with a spiritual longing Karr didn't even know she possessed. It sounds as if she was hellish to be around for much of the time she describes here, but she is certainly good company now. bookworld@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002SVQCW4
Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins e-books; Reprint edition (October 14, 2009)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 14, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2162 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 404 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #181,530 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #206 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
- #448 in Substance Abuse Recovery
- #463 in Read & Listen for $14.99 or Less

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4.4 1,428 ratings

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Mary Karr

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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.

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I don't know if I can

Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2010

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I don't know if I can review this book fairly. I loved it and was disappointed by it... found it frustratingly difficult to read and riveting... it made me angry and sad and happy and it was one of those books that exhausts you even as it fills you with energy.

Tim Hawkins, the Christian stand up comedian, tells a joke about Church people. Adopting a hang dog expression he pretends to be the person in the pew listening to a powerful witness and he says: "This guy has a BEAUTIFUL witness... I have a terrible one... I wish I was addicted to crack...." His timing is perfect he adds a sarcastic and disappointed "THANKS God!"

Christians have had this (immature) reaction to the powerful conversion of others from the beginning, and we are all tempted to it, which is why Hawkins gets huge laughs with this schtick. Christ makes sure to include the older brother in the story of the prodigal son for a reason. He covers it too when he speaks about the workers in the field getting their daily wage at the end of the day.

Yet reminding yourself of those facts as you read doesn't silence the enemy. He tries to make you jealous. "I wish I was an alcoholic and divorced and only had one kid and taught literature at a fancy school after being locked in the looney bin for a while..... THANKS God!!"

To say Mary Karr is a good writer is a serious understatement. I rank her up there with Flannery O'Connor... almost. More on this later. I think this woman is an absolute genius. She uses words in ways most of us who do any writing, even meaningless stuff like our random thoughts on websites, can only dream of.

The book was very difficult for me to read. The story of her addictions is so painfully told, her relationships and the characters so vividly painted, that I just had to put it down to avoid becoming overwhelmed at points.

And there is the fact that this book reads like a confession. She holds absolutely nothing back. Mary Karr may be one of the most self-reflective writers I have read, and her self-knowledge is incredible. I really admire her ability to look in the mirror... and then write.

But it also made me mad. I mean, everyone will heap praise on this book and Mary Karr because she was on the sauce and has learned to be sober and be nice to people. But darn it, being Catholic is about WAY more than that, and she doesn't touch on any of it. This always makes me angry when I read these things. At least she doesn't go out on a limb to attack the Church that she just entered by denying all the Church's teachings like some recent "converts" have done. But it ticks me off nonetheless. What about the hard stuff? The stuff we always get thrown in our faces? I mean... I was never drunk (much) but throwing my contraceptives in the garbage wasn't easy... TALK TO ME. I am one of those idiots who actually believes ALL this stuff!!!

I mean Flannery O'Connor ran from NOTHING. Read her letters. Her theology is so deep and rich and CATHOLIC and her struggles so articulately communicated... I found myself saying "Mary Karr has the talent... GIVE ME MORE O'Connor!!!"

And that isn't fair, but I read this book while reading O'Connor's letters and the comparison was unavoidable (they ARE both southern in my defense) and it isn't fair to make my love for Catholic doctrine demand every other Catholic put that front and center too.

But... but... is she REALLY saying that she became Catholic because some people at Church were nice to her, and she prayed, and she doesn't mention dogma once except to say that it gets people excited?

Doesn't she realize that during lent when she had that waking vision of serpents at 3:00AM and that fact has RELEVANCE??? Its 3 AM!!! Or is she just assuming that those in the know will get it? (Christ died at 3PM and many many exorcists report the devil likes to operate on you when its 3 in the morning your time to mock God and Christ... laugh if you want... But exorcists say it and Mary Karr experienced it)

I know I'm a zealot... I know... I mean I read G.K. Chesterton and Flannery O'Connor, and Hillaire Belloc. I want my Catholicism on steroids, dogma and all, because I love it and think it true. So, I am not sure I can review this one fairly.

I can only say that it is a beautiful book, very well written, and beautifully told, and it won't get her in any trouble with anybody, because she doesn't go THERE.

And darn thats frustrating. But its a great book nonetheless.

Strongly recommended.

14 people found this helpful

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Carolyn

This book changed my life

Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2009

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This book has changed my life. It's not simply a well-thought-out, reflective memoir (although it is both of those things). Mary has taken it to a whole `nuther level here. I can't even articulate what she does in this book because I'm not as good of a writer as she is. But it is beyond the genre classification "memoir."

I also had a troubled childhood in a small town in Texas, but that is pretty much where our similarities end--you don't have to have a lot in common with her to love this book. Like all great literature it is universally appealing. She takes such a hard look at herself that it's sometimes painful to read.

I'm very surprised that one reviewer said that Mary treated her ex-husband unfairly in this book--actually makes me wonder if the reviewer even read the whole thing. Part of what she does in this book is take full responsibility for her own bad behavior, and pretty much takes the blame for her failed marriage.

The spiritual stuff may freak some people out. I have been an agnostic for quite some time, and after reading this book I said my first prayer in ten years. But don't worry--Mary did not become a religious nut and doesn't proselytize the reader here. She experiences forgiveness and love for both others and herself. And she learns how to let go--she does this through spiritual means but this concept is pretty universal even in the secular world. I am currently in counseling to deal with my control issues (among other things) which have been causing me severe anxiety for many years. This book is like bargain therapy. The way she delves into her psychological issues will make you do the same, in a very gentle and subtle way, and has been just as effective as counseling in helping my anxiety. I actually have plans to re-read this book and take notes (and I almost never re-read books). Because I don't take medication for my anxiety, I have to have an arsenal of other coping mechanisms and I have just added this book to that list.

I also want to note that Mary seems like a genuinely cool and nice person. On her facebook page, she answers almost every post that a fan puts on her wall, even the ones that are a little bit wacky. Her responses are charming and funny, and she doesn't try to maintain the aloof air that many successful writers do.

I also highly recommend The Liars Club.

12 people found this helpful

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EJ

Very thought provoking

Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2010

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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.

4 people found this helpful

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Charles K. Wilber

Powerful moving memoir

Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2024

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I loved this book both for its beautiful writing and for its powerful story of finding God in the midst of pain.

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2024

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Mary Carr had me laughing and crying again, but even more so than I did from her first book. I was entertained, yes, but also learned a lot more about addiction by her detailed account of recovery. She has also inspired me to return to my roots of spirituality that I left many years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.

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Kristine Laco

A Wonderful Surprise

Reviewed in Canada on July 21, 2021

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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.”

2 people found this helpful

Dr Naughton

Beautifully written

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 10, 2023

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This book is honest in a way that lets you see yourself in the harsh light of someone else's failings and find forgiveness.

lorena

It opened my mind to different realities

Reviewed in Spain on January 14, 2019

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I bought this book on recommendation, and it took me a while for me to engage with story. By the end, I was loving it. I am an atheist and for the first time felt jealous I was not an spiritual person.

One person found this helpful

BAZZA

Snakebite lyrics

Reviewed in Germany on June 15, 2013

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I said that about Mary Karr's lyrics to the "KIN" album with Rodney Crowell and it more than applies to this final edition of her 3 books of memoirs about growing up in East Texas as a gawky kid, experiencing life's medicine cabinet as a teen surfer girl and getting married into the academic circle of maturity and success as a writer later in life. She doesn't mince words and spares no feelings in this bare bones honest-to-God story of a search for a higher understanding of the whys and wherefores of her place in the complicated scheme of things as they unwind mysteriously around her. She writes with a clarity and a crystal clear memory of situations and conversations that for the most of us have long disappeared into the fog of the past. It's as painful as bruised ribs can be at times and even when you laugh it hurts. Great stuff.

Zoe Ballek

The best of the 3

Reviewed in Canada on June 30, 2017

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Mary Karr writes her memoirs in poetry. Despite me being a spiritual atheist, her conversion story spoke to me on many levels.

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Lit : A Memoir (P.S. Book 3) Kindle Edition

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