Lit
A Memoir
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4.3 • 153 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
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."
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.
Customer Reviews
Very Honest & Genuine Read!
I'm from west Texas and greatly enjoyed the humorous and very realistic description Karr provides to the reader. She does a marvelous job of describing the trials, tribulations, and inner thought processes that go along with being an adult child of an alcoholic, an alcoholic, single mother, financially strapped, and religiously apprehensive.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone battling similar environments.
Heartbreaking and redeeming
So beautifully written I didn’t want to put it down; so heartbreaking (through the first three sections) I didn’t know if I could read another word. But I’m glad I did.
Loved every page
After reading all of Mary Karr's books I feel she's a friend of mine, quirky one that she is! We're the same age, I've lived in Houston for years so I'm pretty sure I know what city Leechfield is, and I also struggled with religion. I'm sorry there's not another memoir of hers out there. I'm going to miss her!