Lit: A Memoir
By Mary Karr
Published November 3, 2009 (Hardcover) Harper
Mary Karr changed the rules of memoir when she wrote The Liars’ Club, she continued that tone in Cherry, and topped it off with her newest memoir, LIT .
In LIT, she brazenly reprises enough of her earlier life to set the stage for the emotional strip she does for the current memoir. Karr exposes her alcoholism and depression, checking into the Mental Marriott, as she calls the famous loony bin where she stays for several weeks. Wearing slippers with happy faces on them.
So, yes, LIT is funny as well as brutally honest. And so is Mary. I interviewed her, and will blog about that on Monday. You will be able to hear the interview on Open Book with Diana Page Jordan on www.pdx.fm at 1pm PST, or download the podcast later.
She marries a gorgeous man whose upbringing is as foreign to her, as hers is to him. Warren is from Old Money on the east coast, reserved in attitude and appropriate. Mary is a witty Texan.
Her alcoholic mother is clean when Mary and Warren’s son Dev is born, and for some crazy reason, her mom reintroduces Mary to booze. This time, she can’t seem to get sober, no matter how hard she tries. It’s when the marriage starts falling apart that she finds herself on the brink of suicide — a half an attempt, as she puts it.
She stumbles upon 12-Step groups, and the alcoholics tell her she must embrace God or at least a Higher Power. Mary grew up an existentialist. Her transformation — as she first curses at God whom, she believes, got her into this mess to the first crack in her resistance, then to wholeheartedly believing in God, and becoming a Catholic — is a gorgeous arc.
LIT wasn’t the easiest book for me to read. I enjoyed a hunk of drunk years myself — happily drinking the guys under the table, stripping off my clothes on the front lawns of radio stations and — I am told — on houseboats, and then looking at my mother’s life and deciding — about twenty years ago — to never touch a drop of booze again. Mostly, I was the child of the drunken mother, wife of an addictive man, and the mother of the addicted son. Most of my life, I’ve been codependent, which I have now mostly unraveled.
Points of Mary’s story poke at my most tender memories. It is hard for me to read LIT — a flood of my own troubled times wash out the dikes I’ve erected over time. I can hear the ice cubes clinking in the glass, as my mother staggers around. My stepfather’s yelling and breaking bottles. Seeing the holes in the wall the next morning — from my stepfather’s fist and my mother’s butt, where she fell. The day of the beauty pageant my mother made me enter, and she was nowhere around — she was hospitalized instead. My life — a different angle from Mary’s. When she sees herself becoming like her mother to her son, she stops drinking. That’s powerful, persuasive stuff.
The book is funny, too, and it is — my favorite — transformational. Mary Karr’s life is back together, better than she ever dreamed possible.
