Mary Karr and Diana Page Jordan on PDX.FM
LIT: A Memoir
By Mary Karr
Published November 3, 2009 (Hardcover) Harper
She’s tough, wise-cracking, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d pulled a lady-like pistol from her purse while routing for a pen, at Powell’s City of Books, where we met for the interview.
The closest ex-Texan Mary Karr comes to that image is when she says she couldn’t quit drinking — that she sat out on the porch, “smoking Marlboro’s, listening to Mozart, and feeling sorry” for herself.
LIT — Mary tells me — is what happened after leaving the Texas backwater of The Liar’s Club and her “drug-sodden adolescence” of Cherry.
LIT is poetic and presumably missing the self-doubts that she originally packed in there. Mary says she threw away one-thousand completely finished pages — which is why it took seven years to write LIT. Although Mary wrote a lot of poetry in her early literary years, she says “It wasn’t the poetry I wrote that helped me, it was the poetry I read.” Poetry, she explains — as a fairly-newly minted Catholic — is eucharistic. You take someone else’s suffering into your body and you are transformed by it.
When Mary finally decided to sober up, she was told by a woman in a 12-step group “What if the solution to all your problems is spiritual?” Mary jumped from bleakly existential — not just to accepting God — but to becoming a Catholic. She teetered into God territory initially because she looked at the sober people around her, and noticed that those who were happy had embraced God, and the sober ones “who were ready to rip somebody’s head off” hadn’t.
LIT is rough-riding at times — especially when the material is so painfully familiar. I grew up in an alcoholic family, and there are a lot of brain synapses to retrain.
But, LIT is meant to be funny, and it is. Picture the Happy Faces embossed on the slippers at the Mental Marriott aka the HaHa Hotel. That’s just for starters.
Pattye Hubbard said,
September 25, 2011 @ 1:31 am
I am so excited…I cannot wait to order Mary’s book. I have never responded to any one in this fashion but I just had to say Thank You. I am a cradle Catholic, yet have never heard anyone define Eucharist as Mary has above: “You take someone else’s suffering into your body and you are transformed by it.”
I just learned about Mary Karr from an America Magazine article and a podcast. I, too, grew up in an alcoholic home – I was not an alcoholic, as Mary confessed, but I had other addictions I am overcoming within my own spiritual journey. Peace, Pattye