Lit
A Memoir
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4.1 • 9 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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."
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Poet Mary Karr completes her trilogy of memoirs with this haunting and emotional recounting of what happened to the East Texas tomboy of The Liars’ Club and the rebellious, questing young woman of Cherry: She made something of herself as a writer, teacher, and mother. But she also developed the same serious drinking problem that made growing up with her parents so difficult. Lit recounts all of this with the same unflinching honesty, wry humour, and simply gorgeous imagery as her earlier books. Even when she’s writing about painful subjects, like her physically and emotionally abusive relationship with author David Foster Wallace, there’s a sense of peace here, quite possibly as a result of both her hard-won sobriety and the wholly unexpected spiritual awakening she experienced afterward.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Karr returns with her third account (after The Liar's Club and Cherry) of her dark and drunken years as a newlywed and new mother, written to help her son get "the whole tale" of their early years together. Before she wrote memoirs, Karr was driven with a vagabond spirit toward poetry, whose origins she traces to the rural colloquialisms of her Texas roots. That poetic sensibility infuses every sentence of her story with an alliterative and symbolic energy, conjuring echoes of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and occasionally, Sylvia Plath. She even marries a fellow poet, a moneyed and controlling man named Warren. Unlike Plath, however, Karr's impulse toward self-destruction originates more from the example set by her larger-than-life, emotionally stunted parents, who were often her drinking partners. Her slow trudge toward writing success and her marriage to yet another man who comes from wealth set off her drinking in earnest. Soon she's drinking daily at all hours, hiding it in shame. Years later she obtains sobriety but not mental health, and checks into a hospital after a halfhearted suicide attempt. What heals her most deeply, however, is when she opens herself to prayer. Fortunately, Karr's wry wit and deft prose do not render her slow conversion to Catholicism in a sentimental or proselytizing manner.
