Print
Email
Share
“Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living,” says Mary Karr. “My life is certainly worth living.”
That borders on understatement.
Karr has distilled three acclaimed memoirs from her 54 turbulent years on the planet. Her newest one, “Lit,” 400 pages, Harper, ($25.99), which chronicles a failed marriage, motherhood, alcoholism, and saving grace.
It follows “The Liars’ Club” in 1995, which recounts Karr’s childhood in East Texas with a dipso, flipso mother, and “Cherry in 2000, which plumbs her rebellious adolescence.
“‘The Liars’ Club and ‘Angela’s Ashes’ (by Frank McCourt) were the key books that ushered in this memoir boom,” says Ben Yagoda, the Swarthmore writer who just published a study of the genre, “Memoir: A History.”
“Those two books were hugely successful, both commercially and artistically,” he says. “They were by authors who were not famous writers; both dealt with childhood — in McCourt’s case a very difficult one, in Karr’s not exactly peaches and cream, either.”
A highly regarded poet, Karr had to be encouraged initially to explore her predilection for autobiographical prose.
“I think I have a pretty good memory. I also think I’m extremely introspective,” she says by phone, explaining the skill set that has resulted in three such intimate, richly detailed, insightful, and lyrically observed journals.
“Not one of them was a cakewalk,” she says of her triptych. “This one was a thousand times harder because I am the culpable one in this scenario. If anybody is being (a jerk), it’s me. It’s way different for that reason.”
Explaining the significance of the book’s title, Karr says, “It means literature. To me, poetry was the third rail that ran through my heart and kept me alive from when I was a kid. It also means drinking a fifth of Jack Daniel’s at a pop. I have a hard time believing I did that, but I did. And it certainly means feeling in touch with the luminous, the invisible.”
Quoting writers from Emily Dickinson to Dorothy Parker, Emile Zola to Harry Crews, Karr depicts her descent into alcoholism and the dissolution of her marriage to a blueblood poet who eschewed his family’s money.
As she has done with everyone who figures prominently in her memoirs, she offered to let her ex vet the manuscript. He chose not to, but did request a pseudonym, so she dubbed him “Warren Whitbread.”
“Lit’s most searing chapters deal with Karr’s desperate efforts to quit drinking.
“Nobody gets sober out of virtue,” she says ruefully. “Usually you have a flamethrower to your ass.”
After nearly smashing her car into a concrete highway divider during a snowy night in Cambridge, Mass., while in an alcoholic stupor, Karr determined to give up booze once and for all.
But the rocky transition left her deracinated, unsheathed, and suicidal. She checked into McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility outside Boston where she had what she terms in the book “my nervous breakthrough.”
Lit is littered with small deaths — of illusions, habits, and hopes. But it is also full of reawakenings, as in this passage describing Karr’s experience at her first recovery meeting:
“I heap my watery coffee with powdered cream and stop thinking about myself long enough to come alive a little. I notice in the professor’s baggy face his red-rimmed eyes, and the care in the marine’s gaze starts to plug me into something invisible that rivers among these strangers. It’s like running from my cardiac area, I’ve been dragging a long extension cord unplugged from all compassion, and it’s suddenly found a socket. The room comes breathing to life.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge for Karr was effectively describing her embrace of faith and her eventual conversion to Catholicism.
While likening writing about spirituality to “doing card tricks on the radio,” Karr has been pleased with the reaction to this part of the book. “Most people, even agnostics, have been accepting of my experience,” she says. “If you tell people the truth, they tend to be pretty tolerant.”
That fierce and courageous commitment to telling the truth has endeared Karr to countless readers. Even those who, like author Anne Lamott (“Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith), discovered Karr through her poetry.
“I loved it like everyone else loved “Liars’ Club,” Lamott says via e-mail. “I was so grateful for its honesty and dark lyricism, the ache and the great sense of humor, both the moments of spiritual insight and the human and black-humored way in which she describes all that she and I have in common — kids, parents, alcoholism, messes, comebacks, limbo, loss, resurrection.”
The three memoirs have provided Karr with an unexpected escape from the poet’s lot of genteel poverty.
“I’m not Oprah,” Karr says. “I didn’t do this to help people. I did it to generate income. When people say, ‘You have helped me with my children’ or ‘I’m trying to quit drinking’ or ‘I’m going through a divorce and I’m scared’ or ‘I had a complicated mother and you gave me hope’ — that’s an incredible mitzvah.”
