[ed. Reading this now, and it's terrific.]
In “Lit,” her searing new memoir, Mary Karr recalls that she and her impossible mother used to play a game, when they were driving or her mother was bored or sprawled on her bed with a hangover: “Tell me a story she liked to say, meaning charm me — my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me.”
This game, aided and abetted by her father’s abundant storytelling gifts — his ability to regale his drinking buddies with all manner of startling tales — would fuel Ms. Karr’s own hunger for putting “marks on paper.” Even when she was a child, stapling together a book of rhymes she’d done in crayon, she knew that writing was a way she “could puncture the soap bubble” of her mother’s misery, that writing was a way to seize people’s attention and enthrall them.
With “Lit” Ms. Karr has done just that: She has written a book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go. It’s a memoir that traces the author’s descent into alcoholism and her conflicted, piecemeal return from that numb hell — a memoir that explores the subjectivity of memory even as it chronicles with searching intelligence, humor and grace the author’s slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer.
“Lit” is by no means a perfect performance: the sections dealing with the author’s ex-husband, Warren, feel oddly fuzzy and abstract, but for the reader who can manage to push those sections aside, the book is every bit as absorbing as Ms. Karr’s devastating 1995 memoir, “The Liars’ Club,” which secured her place on the literary map.
That earlier book focused on her harrowing childhood with an increasingly absent father and a crazy mother, who, during one moment of madness, set fire to her two daughters’ toys and threatened them with a knife; the 2000 sequel, “Cherry,” dealt with the author’s drug-laced, boy-crazy adolescence in a small Texas town.
“Lit,” in contrast, deals with a less anomalous story — that is, a story of addiction and recovery, by now familiar in outline from the many A.A.-like autobiographies produced during the memoir craze of the late ’90s. Whereas many of these lesser efforts were propelled by the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art, Ms. Karr’s own work demonstrates that candor and self-revelation only become literature when they are delivered with hard-earned craft, that the exposed life is not the same as the examined one.
by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Marion Ettlinger
In “Lit,” her searing new memoir, Mary Karr recalls that she and her impossible mother used to play a game, when they were driving or her mother was bored or sprawled on her bed with a hangover: “Tell me a story she liked to say, meaning charm me — my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me.” This game, aided and abetted by her father’s abundant storytelling gifts — his ability to regale his drinking buddies with all manner of startling tales — would fuel Ms. Karr’s own hunger for putting “marks on paper.” Even when she was a child, stapling together a book of rhymes she’d done in crayon, she knew that writing was a way she “could puncture the soap bubble” of her mother’s misery, that writing was a way to seize people’s attention and enthrall them.
With “Lit” Ms. Karr has done just that: She has written a book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go. It’s a memoir that traces the author’s descent into alcoholism and her conflicted, piecemeal return from that numb hell — a memoir that explores the subjectivity of memory even as it chronicles with searching intelligence, humor and grace the author’s slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer.
“Lit” is by no means a perfect performance: the sections dealing with the author’s ex-husband, Warren, feel oddly fuzzy and abstract, but for the reader who can manage to push those sections aside, the book is every bit as absorbing as Ms. Karr’s devastating 1995 memoir, “The Liars’ Club,” which secured her place on the literary map.
That earlier book focused on her harrowing childhood with an increasingly absent father and a crazy mother, who, during one moment of madness, set fire to her two daughters’ toys and threatened them with a knife; the 2000 sequel, “Cherry,” dealt with the author’s drug-laced, boy-crazy adolescence in a small Texas town.
“Lit,” in contrast, deals with a less anomalous story — that is, a story of addiction and recovery, by now familiar in outline from the many A.A.-like autobiographies produced during the memoir craze of the late ’90s. Whereas many of these lesser efforts were propelled by the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art, Ms. Karr’s own work demonstrates that candor and self-revelation only become literature when they are delivered with hard-earned craft, that the exposed life is not the same as the examined one.
by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Marion Ettlinger
