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Lit

by Mary Karr

3.79 · rating details · 5,195 ratings · 1,079 reviews

"The Liars' Club" brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood. "Cherry," her account of her adolescence, "continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal" ("Entertainment Weekly"). Now Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and m

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Hardcover, 386 pages

Published November 1st 2009 by Harper (first published October 14th 2009)

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New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009

18th out of 100 books — 127 voters

Substance Abuse & Addiction

42nd out of 151 books — 268 voters

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Community Reviews

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Dec 08, 2009

Jen Knox rated it

Karr's hard-edged poetic voice made The Liars' Club one of my favorite books. In Lit, I found the voice just as searing and lovely, perhaps not as consistent. For me, the childhood digressions--nods to her previous works--were the weakest portions of the narrative, but they were brief, and moreover, they were easily forgiven when bookmarking transcendent scenes such as one in which a group of illiterate women in a group home remind the author the universality of good poetry. I highly recommend...more

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Dec 12, 2011

Julie Davis rated it

Shelves: 2011, catholic, book-club, memoir, nonfiction, put-on-hc

Reading this for my book club.

O.M.G.

If there is a genre I hate, it is that of addicts telling their life stories ... yes, even when they come out Christian at the other end. Just like a bad movie made for Christian ends, an angsty book told for Christian ends does nothing for me. First give me good art (story) I say, then worry about what else is in it.

It isn't that I don't have sympathy for the people themselves, it is that their books inevitably seem to be all abo...more

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Jul 26, 2011

Ruth rated it

Okay - I know this author has won awards and I am supposed to have thought this book was wonderful, but I didn't. I swear I could hear her thumbing through the thesaurus to find words we do not use in normal conversation. Keep in mind she is a poet by trade, not a nonfiction writer, so the disjointed nature of her autobiography is to be somewhat expected. Yes, she did have a hard life as a child and her alcohol abuse made her less than a great mom but I had a hard time not telling to her to grow...more

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May 11, 2011

Mike rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: books-that-are-contagiums-for-writi, favorites

On its funniest and its most harrowing pages, Mary Karr's Lit reminds me of Augusten Burroughs's Dry; both sarcastic, heartbroken protagonists are helplessly addicted to alcohol, romantically incapacitated, and surrounded by saccharine morons. In moron-land, Karr escapes mental institution bureaucracy in time to attend a literary reception in her honor by using guile. The institute's Nurse Ratchett "has a tendency to bring up penis envy every session, and I swear that this time, when she do...moreOn its funniest and its most harrowing pages, Mary Karr's Lit reminds me of Augusten Burroughs's Dry; both sarcastic, heartbroken protagonists are helplessly addicted to alcohol, romantically incapacitated, and surrounded by saccharine morons. In moron-land, Karr escapes mental institution bureaucracy in time to attend a literary reception in her honor by using guile. The institute's Nurse Ratchett "has a tendency to bring up penis envy every session, and I swear that this time, when she does, I'll confess to my intense longing for a dick of my own, for in most places that pretend to value honesty, I've usually found that sucking up is an underrated virtue given how well it works." Both Karr and Burroughs start going to AA meetings with anthropological distance. They resist and mock the moist-eyed AA hand-holders, but both eventually give in.

For me, maybe because I finished the book on a spring day in the Cherry Esplanade of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Lit is about softening; softening to God, to the present moment, to Love, to Whatever-It-Is. As cherry blossoms fell around me, as children knocked over empty garbage cans, as subscribing members of the garden perused an exclusive sale under a white tent, I felt a perfect softening. My eyes left the last page. I pressed some of the pink blossoms into the book before heading to class.

Seven days after I finished Lit, I checked out some plays from the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center. It was breezy and blue out, so I decided to walk to school, twenty-three blocks south. An old, big church on 59th Street was covered in scaffolding. A flyer under the scaffolding caught my eye. On the second floor of the church's parish center, in twenty four hours, Mary Karr would be giving a talk for a priest's radio show.

I went. The thirty chairs were mostly filled by the time the event started, but attendance was by no means generous. I sat in the front row. She talked about her very down-to-earth relationship with prayer, with church doctrine, and with love. I asked the only secular question of the evening: could she speak to her state when she sits down to write? "My state when I'm writing? Terror. Uh, constant disappointment and self-loathing. Mixed with, uh, yeah, dread. A lot of dread. That's my state. Maybe one other question?"

At the book signing, I told her about accidentally seeing the flyer.

"God is calling you," she said with mock import. Neither of us seemed like we belonged in a church, but here we were.

She said to me, "It's an interesting conversation we're all having."

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Aug 19, 2010

Cherylann rated it

Shelves: memoirs

I read a lot of memoirs. There's something about peering into someone else's life that gives me a chance to pause and reflect on mine. Lit was no exception. It appears to be brutually honest, although it may not be since it's based on the recollections of an alcoholic. However, Karr does not paint herself to be a saint for having gotten herself into recovery or blame her past for her descent into alcoholism and depression. There were times as I read that I didn't want to read anymore. I wanted t...more

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Jul 22, 2010

Becky rated it

Karr follows up her adolescent memoirs Liar's Club and Cherry with her memoir of alcholism and recovery. Karr writes with such self-deprecating wit and Southern charm that it's hard to believe we aren't good, long friends. There's plenty to admire here, but I was often irritated by her fairly superficial religious views. Her conversion feels real and necessary and very much part of the reason why she's not currently in an alcoholic coma or dead. Still, her version of faith is a wee bit too cl...more

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Feb 02, 2010

Jean rated it

Shelves: drugs-addiction-recovery, memoir-female

This felt hastily written and not well edited. Maybe the author just ran out of good material. In large part, it’s a recollection of alcoholism and/or depression and recovery that isn’t that different or more inspiring than many other so-so examples of this genre.

The author describes many of her fellow mentally troubled fellow patients in Maclean hospital, or in her AA group, but reducing each person to a few paragraphs and without developing much connection to her story makes it...more

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Dec 22, 2009

Kaya rated it

Suspect the world does not need another review of Mary Karr’s newest memoir, but I do have some scattered thoughts on it. I feel, however, that they must be prefaced by multiple caveats, which may be the scattered thoughts in disguise. Caveat one: I’ve not read any of her other books. Have seen occasional poems of hers in magazines. Caveat two: She studied with a poet I also studied with, who makes a couple of appearances in this book as she begins to ascend into the poetry firmament. Caveat thr...moreSuspect the world does not need another review of Mary Karr’s newest memoir, but I do have some scattered thoughts on it. I feel, however, that they must be prefaced by multiple caveats, which may be the scattered thoughts in disguise. Caveat one: I’ve not read any of her other books. Have seen occasional poems of hers in magazines. Caveat two: She studied with a poet I also studied with, who makes a couple of appearances in this book as she begins to ascend into the poetry firmament. Caveat three: Much of this book is about poetry and the journey toward being a career poet, an occupation I’ve abandoned (fodder for a different blog entry/essay, but much of what Dan Nester writes here is true for me as well), so I tend to view that part of her story with a jaded eye. Caveat four: It’s a recovery story, and I’ve never had a serious problem with alcohol; aside from some typical twentysomething years of social binge drinking, I grew up to be a teetotaler. That being said, I do come from an alcoholic family, so I’ve witnessed quite a bit of what she describes. Caveat five: The book was loaned to me by my friend Father A, who’s a Paulist priest and someone I have a deep admiration for. Lest I sound like Ann Lamott, who always seems to be quoting her “priest friend”, I’ll just say that Father A was a writing teacher in seminary and reads a lot of interesting things. And finally, caveat six: I was working at a bookstore around the time the big wave of memoirs began, and I’ve been appalled by some of the terrible writing that’s come out of this genre and the Augusten Burroughs, “I’ll write five memoirs before I’m fifty!” megalomaniacal style of rubbernecking, navel gazing memoir (no, they are not all like this, but you know what I’m talking about). However, I’m particularly interested in female writing about spirituality at the moment, so I’ve been trying to overcome my memoir-phobia in order to read some sublime stuff (Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness, Theresa of Avila, Hildegard Von Bingen, etc) and some utterly appalling, smug, irritating, trite anti-feminist crap (Ahem, Eat, Pray, Love. Michael K over at Dlisted refers to that one as “Queef, Fart, Poop”, which just about sums it up for me).

Karr is clearly a better writer than Elizabeth Gilbert, and no matter how much I can’t get into some aspects of her book, she can turn a phrase and tell a story — which ought to be plenty enough for a memoir. The thing about this book, however, is the sense of weariness about the enterprise (and this may be my misinterpretation having never read her other memoirs). There’s a kind of steady narrative interruption throughout where she stops in order to have a flashback, but these often feel like retreads of stories told elsewhere, and that’s again coming from someone who hasn’t read said stories before. Nonetheless, the vividness of some things here is irresistible, and I like the fact that she’s hard on herself; real writers are really fucking hard on ourselves, and in my experience we don’t really like ourselves all that much, which she gets. After recovery, however, Karr starts praying — I’m totally fine with that — but she also starts loving herself, and gets a great job (tenure track!) and publishes books (interestingly, she does the same thing I complained about in regards to Julie and Julia and says “blah blah you’re not a writer until you publish a book”, then repeats several times that the book was ignored, although it lead to accolades, tenure, better publication of her next book, meeting famous writers et cetera; I was confused about this part of the narrative). She has a torrid affair with David Foster Wallace (though her writing about it doesn’t feel exploitative — I had to re-read her description of him a couple of times before the faint ping of recognition went off), she becomes a responsible mother, forgives her own mother for being insane and drunk, and so on. It feels like a rather pat “happy ending”, and dampened my enthusiasm for the book. Her conversion story only takes up less than a forth of the whole thing, and she seems to have picked Catholicism kind of randomly — she complains the Episcopal church wasn’t heated enough in winter — and it’s kind of bunched together version of what must have been a pretty significant experience for her. I found myself liking Mary Karr the writer more than Mary Karr’s book, if that makes any sense. Perhaps it just needed a more merciless editor who might have trimmed down some of the digressive passages, but as much as the writing itself was compelling, much of the story left me a little confused.

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Sep 21, 2011

Corinne Lundstrum added it · review of another edition

Shelves: books-i-started-by-didn-t-finish

I'm not sure I am going to finish this one. Karr writes of her husband "If he hates a book on page one, he'll nonetheless finish it, for he's made the commitment." Well I decided to try to get to the 50% mark before I decided that I am not willing to commit to this book. It may just be that I'm really not into memoirs. I think it really came down to the fact that I did not like Karr or care what happened to her. But there were some laugh out loud moments. I could see why people w...more

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Feb 03, 2012

Nancy Kennedy rated it

Well, now I know what happened to all the emotion I didn't hear in Mary Karr's voice in The Liars' Club, the story of her blighted childhood. She stuffed it all down until adulthood. This book is one long screech of pain.

To me, this Mary Karr is more genuine than the author of Liar's Club. That memoir was very stylized -- down-home Texas tall tale, outsized, but to me, antiseptic. In Lit, Mary Karr emotes. She italicizes, she all-caps, she streams exclamation points. She hisses, she ...moreWell, now I know what happened to all the emotion I didn't hear in Mary Karr's voice in The Liars' Club, the story of her blighted childhood. She stuffed it all down until adulthood. This book is one long screech of pain.

To me, this Mary Karr is more genuine than the author of Liar's Club. That memoir was very stylized -- down-home Texas tall tale, outsized, but to me, antiseptic. In Lit, Mary Karr emotes. She italicizes, she all-caps, she streams exclamation points. She hisses, she claws, she swears. And she swigs... a lot.

Her descent into alcoholism is finely observed. Even after she sobers up, she feels the never-ending pull of drink: "These powerful urges are close to complete madness, the old drunk self so fully occupying my body, it's like being possessed." And hooray for a writer who doesn't flinch at honestly recounting the train wreck that is new motherhood -- she titles one chapter Postal Partum. "A doubled cough punctures my head like two shots from a nail gun," she writes about being wakened by her son's midnight coughing.

I would have been completely besotted by this book if it weren't for two things. One, the style was too, too twee, with several recurring annoyances: "We loved each other this way, Daddy and I, from afar." It's poetic the first time but after the hundredth time, I just want to read "Daddy and I loved each other from afar." The other authorial tic that bugged me was an odd use of the word "which": "But I saw the shine in Mother's eyes as that opera washed over her. Which music Daddy cared diddly for." Over and over and over again.

The second caveat is more substantive. In the last third of the book, Karr undergoes a spiritual awakening. Its gradual nature and her resistance was the best part of the book, as far as I'm concerned. What I didn't like is that to prove something, to prove her "street cred," I guess, Karr must have felt she had to be more raw, use more profanity, swagger more. I guess she doesn't want the "wuss" label now that she espouses a belief. I hope she can overcome that posturing at some point. It creates the same remoteness I felt in Liar's Club, although this time it's religion, not therapy or creative writing courses, that creates the distance. (less)

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Jan 19, 2012

Sylvia rated it

Lit is the first book I've read by Mary Karr and apparently should have begun with The Liar's Club. Apparently i'll be working backwards on her life story. I suppose that's what any of us who attempt to chronicle and make sense of our experiences do...we work backwards.

In some ways Karr works backwards and forwards and leaves large gaps. But still, I like memoir and honesty and found Karr to be raw honest and funny. It had glowing reviews while others fault her for be self-absorbed...more

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Dec 07, 2011

Andy rated it

This memoir tells the story of the author's battle with alcohol addiction as an adult, especially as a young mother, through her successful recovery and literary success. Mary Karr is a great writer and tells a compelling story. She was especially sensitive but honest in her treatment of her ex-husband and father of her son during her struggle. The memoir also includes the reception to her first success, the publication of Liar's club and the resulting contrast to her earlier life with little mo...more

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Nov 24, 2011

Colleen rated it

Shelves: memoir, nonfiction

As a memoir of alcoholism and a successful escape from it, Lit doesn’t lack for interesting details. However, it also doesn’t delve too much into the source of her alcoholism (sounds like previous memoirs addressed her tumultuous childhood, which likely contributed to her drinking), nor does it let the reader in too close. Overall, the book feels like the author is inviting us in to her life but then pulls a curtain to hide the mess in the backroom. The biggest drawback though is her constant...more

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Nov 05, 2011

David Carr rated it

Among the confessions of the contemporary world, this book must rate above all others. It is as clear a case of self-rescue as we can find. The victim and the willful girl of The Liar's Club and Cherry grows into chronological adulthood carrying all the burdens of those books, and more. Lit might well be an exemplification of the truth I first read about in Alice Miller's books: our upbringing gives us more than we can bear, before we can know what is being done to us. And so Mary Karr write...moreAmong the confessions of the contemporary world, this book must rate above all others. It is as clear a case of self-rescue as we can find. The victim and the willful girl of The Liar's Club and Cherry grows into chronological adulthood carrying all the burdens of those books, and more. Lit might well be an exemplification of the truth I first read about in Alice Miller's books: our upbringing gives us more than we can bear, before we can know what is being done to us. And so Mary Karr writes, marries, has a baby boy, drinks and drinks and drinks, and crashes. And fitfully recovers, crashes, recovers, and turns Catholic.

If I am morose, I turn to the great classic music of the Church -- chants and masses -- perhaps for some of the same qualities Mary Karr finds in the high order, clarity of faith, and surely unequalled poetry of Catholicism. (I grew up among Catholic kids, and might easily have been one among them, had the church not opposed my long-divorced father when my parents married.) The music, the art, the language all were not part of my life until I could discover them as an adult, I regret to say. But I don't regret not being Catholic as much as I regret having grown up in the bland church of my youth.

Now, Catholic cruelty and lack of generosity are clear to me. Pederasty, absolutism, papal infallibility, the dictatorial treatment of women, the anti-progressivism, anti-abortion, anti-birth control orthodoxies ... well, I could not be part of that for the shame of it. And so it's uncomfortable for me to see Mary Karr embrace the Church, though I think she needs its rites and prayers. No, that's not all, she needs more: its immense forgiveness, its image of that poor boy Jesus taking it all on, and its multiple forms of grace. I am unsure, but if it has meant her survival, I cannot complain, she is so brilliant. And yet: What thinking and writing might be forbidden to her or place her in conflict? Where does the Church cause her to stand among women and their lives? How might her astonishing gifts as a writer be compromised or unrealized beyond Lit, because the Church is so central to her life, as the bottle once was?

(Two thoughts arrive now. 1. Driving home from Georgia I always notice a billboard encouraging people to trust in Jesus. I wonder what the difference might be if the sign said "Jesus trusts in you." That is, what if Jesus expressed confidence in the divine human, the ethical divine, the generous and kind centrality of our lives, in our strength to sort through ambiguities among others? I admire a faith that encourages people to live up to a reflective model (Jesus, Buddha) and to feel a fellowship among shared conflicts. 2. In the dim years of my twenties, I read a novel by A. J. Langguth called Jesus Christs, where Jesus kept showing up in different guises, a real person, a complexity, an example of imperfect humanity. And here is one more: 3. D. H. Lawrence's corporeal Jesus in The Man Who Died. I like the idea of multiple Jesuses.)

Over time, we all have adored gifted and besotted writers: Hart Crane, Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, Faulkner, just to start. But they all died of it, as people we know in our own lives have died of it. Therefore I will take pleasure in adoring the sober Mary Karr, hoping her torments are responsive to the life of faith, but hoping with equal fervor that the fearless essayist will write more about herself as a teacher and a writer, as a sister, as a parent. We know her as a child, living a victimized and vandalized life. Here we can know her as a woman, growing through her long passage across the rope-bridge of survival. And beyond, there are always torments, no matter what our church. I wish her a long, productive life; I wish her a generous, fruitful, and forgiving genius.

I also wish her continued self-rescue. It is required of us every day. I often tell people to seek out "The Life-line," Winslow Homer's great painting in Philadelphia (there are other versions too), and to understand that he has painted all of our lives in that one image. Homer's great painting could have been the jacket image for this matchless book.

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Sep 12, 2011

Mandy Jo rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: texas-themed

This week’s headline? the demon alcohol

Why this book? online book club

Which book format? kindle (pre-highlighted?)

Primary reading environment? at work some(!)

Any preconceived notions? don’t like memoirs

Identify most with? ladies in recovery

Three little words? “my truest review”

Goes well with? hot-fudge malted

There’s a joke one of my dad’s friends used to tell, about Jesus walking into a bar and blah b...more

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Jul 25, 2011

Shaida Hossein rated it

So I didn't know that this novel was part of a ""triology"" when I started reading it, and then realized that I was reading the last book of the series. But since I didn't have the first two books I just continued reading it and hoped I would be able to follow along. Mary Karr has written The Liars' Club and Cherry. The Liars' Club was about her childhood; whereas, Cherry was about her adolescence. And Lit is about her adult struggles and battles, especially with following he...more

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Jul 12, 2011

Sara rated it

The experience of reading this book is one of being swept so effectively into someone else's experience that I have to give it a five. Pick it up, lie down on the couch, and if you've ever been an aspiring writer, a member of a psychotic family, a lover of poetry or even just an avid reader, you'll be as absorbed as ever you were in Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Jane Eyre. East Texas girl overcomes horrific childhood but has to kick her alcoholism to become best-selling memoirist is just a...moreThe experience of reading this book is one of being swept so effectively into someone else's experience that I have to give it a five. Pick it up, lie down on the couch, and if you've ever been an aspiring writer, a member of a psychotic family, a lover of poetry or even just an avid reader, you'll be as absorbed as ever you were in Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Jane Eyre. East Texas girl overcomes horrific childhood but has to kick her alcoholism to become best-selling memoirist is just as gripping as Jane finding love but needing to overcome Rochester's bigamous impulses, or Anne finding a home in Prince Edward Island once she starts getting a grip on her habit of living only in daydreams.

Karr delivers us what we want the most: a tale of upward mobility and material success that is also the tale of moral reform. Little Mary had the discipline to live through a psychotic mother, stop drinking and trust God, thus she is now a wealthy author living in Manhattan. I confess to having eaten up every last spoonful.

But I wonder. Can a narrative of spiritual reform also be a narrative of material success? I haven't got the slightest doubt that Karr experienced a real spiritual reform. She tells the story of her drunkenness without a trace of defensiveness or self-excuse. She struggles to forgive her mother, and if the tone of all three of her books can be believed, she succeeds. After reading all three memoirs, *I* have trouble forgiving her mother. She was a dangerous and impossible woman. Reading Karr's memoirs makes me humble, makes me want to try to be a better more forgiving person myself. It's just that the logic of "I started to pray, and then God gave me a fellowship. And a book contract. And a best-seller" is very far from the life stories of saints and mystics from whom Karr draws her own spirituality. Those biographies usually go "I started to pray and then God asked me to give up all my worldly wealth, and now the church has set the Spanish Inquisition after me." Karr may be a reluctant Catholic, but this memoir is more aligned with the Protestant tradition of a Christianity of prosperity.

Still, the book is lusciously written, engaging, and offers the hope that we can all become, with a little bit of grace, better selves, while keeping our senses of humor. It is a book worth reading.
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Jul 10, 2011

Brad rated it

This was a tough book for me, in a lot of ways.

1.) As a person in recovery, I find most 'drunkalogues--> I went to AA--> I found God' narratives very tiring. There's parts of my own story (and every addict's) there, but Karr just doesn't have the chops of a David Foster Wallace or even an Augusten Burroughs.

2) As someone who went through a Creative Writing program in college, and dated more than a couple poetesses, this was like a nightmarish rewind of my poor d...moreThis was a tough book for me, in a lot of ways.

1.) As a person in recovery, I find most 'drunkalogues--> I went to AA--> I found God' narratives very tiring. There's parts of my own story (and every addict's) there, but Karr just doesn't have the chops of a David Foster Wallace or even an Augusten Burroughs.

2) As someone who went through a Creative Writing program in college, and dated more than a couple poetesses, this was like a nightmarish rewind of my poor dating choices. Oh yes, I most definitely lived with a petite poet who knew exhaustively how varying literary figures dressed and had complex daddy issues and a tendency to sneak opiates on the weekend. In short, Mary Karr is about as far removed from special as she thinks she is. There's a girl with black lipstick in every CW 204 class, presenting her rendition of 'Daddy Done Bought Me Some Nice Shoes.' So, on a very deep and personal level, I found Karr's Schtick gross.

3) She has the insensitivity to actually leverage her relationship with David Foster Wallace for memoir material. Gross. Given the entirely reclusive nature of DFW (and the very real mourning of his widow) dragging out a six-month stint as fuck-buddies twenty years ago is manipulative and sick.

Okay, let's strip all my baggage approaching this novel out. Does it work? Sort-of-not-really.

Karr takes us on 40-year journey, from surfer-gal-cum-poetry-student to minor-minor-league-poet to washed-up-drunk-divorcee to recovering-and-grateful cliche. There are no surprises. Karr loves her 'Daddy.' She lucks out and marries a deeply enabling man who carries her for 20+ years as she sloshes into addiction and recovery and addiction. She ends up leveraging 20 years of connections in the East Coast literary scene to get this memoir published. She regrets drinking. THE END.

There's just nothing interesting here. Karr has very rudimentary self-examination skills. She seems to misunderstand/misapply lessons learned from her marriage as a core part of her story. I mean, wow, she married into a superlatively wealthy East-Coast clan that was willing to support her and her husband and her family for 20 years. That's nice.

She then paints a grim portrait of herself post-divorce, a 40-something finally having to assume adult duties and responsibilities. So sorry.

At one point in my recovery, I attended 5+ meetings a week. I've heard hundreds (if not thousands) of recovery stories that are deeper, more profound, and that yielded richer insights into the nature of god. Karr's bottom was a brief stay in an upscale mental hospital near Harvard. Her drinking cost her a marriage. This is what in my AA circles we call a 'high bottom.' Karr was basically a very entitled person with great connections who's glided from literary gig to literary gig while nursing an addiction. That doesn't make her interesting: For every Karr, there's a hundred women without her connections or privilege who get sober.

I would not read this again. I would recommend the 'Recovery House' sections of Infinite Jest for anyone curious about a similar story, far better told-- DFW was quick to recognize his incredible position of privilege-- and spent his writing space examining the lives of the less fortunate. I doubt seriously that Karr considers anyone 'less fortunate' than her.

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Jul 02, 2011

Boyu rated it

Genre: Biography
Title: Lit
Author: Mary Karr
Recommendation: 2
ISBN: 978-0-06-059698-9
Publisher: HarperCollins
Number of pages: 386

Synopsis (from book jacket):
Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespear-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatc but troubled mother, reaching the brin...more

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Jun 07, 2011

Virginia rated it

Read it!!! Laugh and weep. It's rollicking, harrowing, and brings one to a deep respect for the sheer will of its heroine to keep moving onward and upward. That can only be accomplished by a terrific writer so I won't bore you with accolades for her turn of phrase.

I am new to this board-- how would anyone see my review, there are so many?!.. Hopefully they would not sort by star#: for me, 5* is for Ana Karenina; 4* is Lord of the Flies... Mary Karr's memoir is right up there with the...more

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Apr 06, 2011

Ekaterina rated it

Lit, Mary Karr. – 1st edition, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2009.
First of all, I just wanted to say that if person is not interested in someone else’s life experience then it might not be a very good book for him/her to read; however, if one is interested in reading and deriving from someone else’s knowledge and life situations than it is a great book . In my case, I love reading memoirs, which this book “Lit” is, because I could compare it to my life and think about certain thin...moreLit, Mary Karr. – 1st edition, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2009.
First of all, I just wanted to say that if person is not interested in someone else’s life experience then it might not be a very good book for him/her to read; however, if one is interested in reading and deriving from someone else’s knowledge and life situations than it is a great book . In my case, I love reading memoirs, which this book “Lit” is, because I could compare it to my life and think about certain things a little deeper. Reading a memoir is like speaking with person in person. It’s like author is sharing her secrets with you; sometimes author shares secrets which no one in real life would ever confront to you and these are the moments when you feel like you are not along in certain problems and issues. That’s why I choose to read this book. I’ve heard that this book is a nonfiction work, so I decided to read it, and frankly, it turned out to be very interesting book. At the end I even felt like I know the author so well, like she is one of my old friends who I didn’t speak to in a while or something.
First and very interesting peculiarity of this book is that author writes it through the voice of mother speaking to her child. It’s like she confesses, tells her child everything about her life during the years when he, her son, was growing up. I find it very effective and unusual as a technique. It is definitely something that you have to get used to at the beginning because at first it feels like the author is talking to you, the reader; however, she is not. She refers to her son. She opens his and her characters in the book brilliantly. We can see that situations are detailed and written so clear and understandable for any type of reader. Sometimes it feels like she is too honest, by that I mean that she is very brutal to herself in confessions. She doesn’t afraid to write and expose that she was an alcoholic and that she went through the recovery. She just describes everything about herself, which makes this book interesting. I guess it would be a great book to read for somebody who went through the same problems in their lives because they can easily relate to the narrator. However, speaking from myself, I have never gotten through that type of problems in my life and I felt that I was supporting and experiencing author’s problems with her. I think that Karr helped me to understand through her character, which is her, more about people, and not just any people but people in possession of alcohol. She made me see how hard it is for a woman to be struggling with that possession and what kind of obstacles she had to overcome in her life.
Interesting memoir, definitely, for someone who likes to use and know how to read through someone else’s life experience.
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Apr 06, 2011

Megan rated it

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Lit by Mary Karr builds off of her other memoir, The Liar's Club as a successor. In it, she details the later portion of her life, from a post-high school age to the tenuous years of her marriage and childrearing.

The book opens with a letter to her son, apologizing for her inconsistencies throughout his life, and reveals a little about her relationship with her mother and how she feels that it has affected her own behavior. The timeline then jumps to her college-age self during a time...moreLit by Mary Karr builds off of her other memoir, The Liar's Club as a successor. In it, she details the later portion of her life, from a post-high school age to the tenuous years of her marriage and childrearing.

The book opens with a letter to her son, apologizing for her inconsistencies throughout his life, and reveals a little about her relationship with her mother and how she feels that it has affected her own behavior. The timeline then jumps to her college-age self during a time of escape from matriculation, which she took on with her friends in the hopes of atoning and healing the darkness she felt inside of her. From there she spins the years of her college life, her own feelings of inadequacy for the pauper-like upbringing she had against that of the Ivy League elite, and her continuous run from, but acknowledgement of, her history.

On occasion, links to The Liar's Club are unearthed. Like in Chapter 3, when she compares her behavior to the classmates around her, saying that she could feel the conditioning her daddy had given her sloughing off as time passed by. From her speech to her vernacular, she was seen as a country girl who was behind the rest of the crowd, not understanding references that everyone else nodded to, using phrases like, "Y'all fixing to go to class?" and knowing that her ability to skin a rabbit or tie a slipknot put her outside of the spectrum that her other classmates came from. She knew that her going off to college, away from the Texan flatland and her sixth-grade-educated daddy, would snap the once-close ties that she had to him. That sense of displacement in her surroundings follows Mary's storytelling into the chapters on her adult life, when falling in love with a humble socialite puts her against the very thing she doesn't understand: a rich lifestyle populated with people who don't have to sweat over their cooking to show their love and who don't have to make ends meet or make the land work in their favor. "I'm bred for farm work," she tells the reader during a visit she and her boyfriend make to his parent's mansion, "and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they'll try - without letup - to break you."

Mary addresses her constant battle with alcohol, admitting that she does just fine without it but she never knows when the urge to drink everything dry will hit. She talks about her relationship with her son after he's born and the tumultuous relationship with her husband. She talks about the various authors and poets that circumnavigate her life, and the intense desire to come to terms with the itch she has to put words to paper. She talks about the journey she takes to getting published and the importance of staying true to herself. Lit is written in a more slipshod manner than The Liar's Club, with intricate sentences and fantastic vocabulary that circle the reader like feral dogs. Sometimes her writing can be disorienting, or can devour the reader whole, but the ride is never dull, and never without an interesting anecdote or snapshot pulled from her memory. As a successor to The Liar's Club, Lit carries the torch in the recounting of Mary Karr's life, but in a different tone, with more than a little crazy tossed in.(less)

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Feb 19, 2011

Sarah rated it

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This was a very emotional book for me. Throughout, I felt sympathy for Mary, but also anger. I agree that her life was hard, and can understand how she would struggle with alcoholism. But, for someone who went through what she went through, I cannot fathom choosing to follow in those footsteps and cause the same problems for your child. She made a lot of bad choices, and luckily she cleaned herself up. I also did not like that she credits her transformation solely to her discovering God. T...more

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Feb 10, 2011

Oceana9 rated it

· review of another edition

I always think it's strange when reviewers say they read a book again immediately after finishing it. I mean, isn't that kind of like keeping eating when you're already full? I'll read a book again a year or more later, when I've forgotten the good parts, but even then there's a sense of loss, like "I know how it ends."

That being said, for the first time in my life, I finished the last page of this book and immediately turned to the first page and started reading it again. ...more

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Feb 08, 2011

Paul Pessolano rated it

The word "Lit" as used in this book title is not for Literature, but rather for "Lit" as lit up from the misuse of alcohol and drugs. Mary Karr tells her life story, and those of you who enjoy biographies and stories that show how one can overcome tremendous adversity, will enjoy this book.

After reading this book, I am of the opinion that life was a lot rougher for Mary Karr than she alludes to in the book. I feel she may have taken it a little easy on the reade...more

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Jan 08, 2011

Mary rated it

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Highly recommend. After taking a bit to really get into it, once I gave it some time and slowed down to appreciate the prose, I was hooked. This is really well-written, and I loved her hard-assed Texas persona, and wacky family characters, although her husband and son, those closest to her during the majority of this memoir are mysteriously fuzzy and bland. The husband in particular, while she appears to try to be fair and respectful, ends up so drab and removed that his only redeeming quality ...more

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Dec 30, 2010

Pam rated it

Drunk stories are always entertaining, but maybe Mary Karr's drunk stories are not as entertaining as she thinks they are. In the end, the stakes are relatively low and the property damage minimal. Karr's account of her slow conversion to Catholicism is at times moving and at times, again, not as dramatic or important as she seems to believe.

My real complaint with the book--and I freely admit it's an unfair one--is her account of her relationship with David Foster Wallace. Karr treats ...more

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Dec 26, 2010

Ashley Lowe rated it

I loved Mary Karr's voice, which is funny, self-deprecating, sometimes raunchy. She reminds me of friends of mine from Texas, who also tend to be full of colorful language and know how to tell a story.

I was taken aback by the Christian element of this book, which got to be a bit much and seemed sneaked in. I get the impression that it was deliberately disguised in the marketing of the book, which says absolutely nothing about the conversion story that takes up way too many of the 4...more

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Dec 18, 2010

tina added it

i guess it's okay to admit that i'm not too discerning when it comes to books. but if i were, i'd still have loved this book. i typically decide whether i like a book based on content alone, with very little attention to form. but karr's writing is remarkable. each page of each chapter is so deliberate. i know nothing about poetry and less about karr (obviated by the fact that this is the third installment of her memoirs the first i read), but I was really impressed by all aspects of this book....more

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Jul 20, 2010

Raymond rated it

Mary Karr’s writing, the work of a master, has (among other things) a hypnotic quality. Critics say Karr’s writing is brilliant, compelling, flowing, rare, “a model.” Surely it is all of this and more. Karr is a metaphor commander.

“Lit” is as fine as anything Mary Karr has done with her memories to this time. But I must note in my life I have known Mary Karr and Marie Karr and Maynard Karr and Michael Karr and Monica Karr and Michelle Karr and Mort Karr. (Pseudonyms.) The Karrs are...more

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About Mary Karr

Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her de...more

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