LIT FOR LIVING: Lit by Mary Karr

 

 

Given that we pretty much know the outcome of this story—Mary Karr will overcome her addictions, become a fabulously successful memoirist, and settle down as a celebrity professor and writer in upstate New York—it’s some trick that she’s able to keep us turning the pages of her latest memoir, Lit, to find out how this all miraculously unfolded. Memoirs about writers becoming alcoholics and then recovering, after all, are practically a dime a dozen.
 

 

Following up on her 1995 memoir The Liars’ Club, about growing up in Southeast Texas, and a sequel, Cherry (2000), Lit picks up Karr’s story when she’s seventeen and takes us all the way to the late 1990s, post-Liars’ Club success, the writer now in her forties. Lit, however, mostly focuses on Karr’s early struggles as a young mother and barely published poet, during a time when the author battled a creeping and ultimately debilitating alcoholism that led to a reluctant courtship with God in order finally to beat it. (The title, as others have pointed out, has a trio of meanings: Lit for literature; Lit as in drunk; and Lit as in illuminated from within, in a spiritual sense.)
 

 

This third installment of Karr’s story, however, gets off to a somewhat slower start: taking care of a toddler son in a mostly loveless marriage while in a state of denial about one’s drinking isn’t necessarily riveting material, at least not here. While there are the requisite close calls, for the most part Karr keeps it together, separating her mothering from her drinking; she often winds up out on her back porch alone after her son has finally fallen asleep, the place where it seems that most of her drinking and ruminating and occasional passing out take place, no matter how cold and dreary the weather.
 

 

Deliberately or not, Karr doesn’t go into much detail about her marriage. Her husband, also a poet from a wealthy, patrician New England family against which he is obviously rebelling, is sketched only vaguely; humorous descriptions of the couple’s visits to his family, for instance, are far more specific and vivid than day-to-day married life back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is given a mostly impressionistic rendering, perhaps because, in her alcoholic haze, Karr can only remember those years in bits and pieces. But the memoir picks up considerable speed once Karr makes the decision to get sober and her marriage unravels for real.
 

 

On her twelve-step journey, Karr runs into a cast of helpful and interesting characters, including an equally-if-not-more-troubled David Foster Wallace, with whom she’ll eventually embark on a short-lived and very tumultuous romance. But her relationship with Wallace (or anyone else for that matter) gets minor play. Other than Wallace and a brief series of dead-end dates, the only guy who can seem to hold Karr’s attention for long is God, the answer to her prayers, quite literally. For it’s only when Karr starts to pray (getting down on her knees and making herself as small as possible despite her very real doubts about such doings) that her life turns around. Days after a semi-revelation on Christmas Eve spent at a homeless shelter (something she pokes fun at), a book of Karr’s poems is accepted, “along with a check of a whopping seven hundred and fifty bucks—about a third of my credit card debt and maybe the most I’ve earned aggregate on poetry in the previous fifteen years.”
 

 

Soon after, Karr prays for a solution to her transportation woes, since she can no longer afford a car, and a professor she’s met through a mutual friend asks Karr to take care of her auto for the summer, since she will be summering in Italy and has no use for it. All of this, however, is merely a preamble to the big jackpot of a prayer being answered: an agent finds her at a creative writing fundraising dinner and urges Karr to write up a proposal and some sample chapters. Karr returns home with the agent’s card in hand and a new work schedule of getting up in the dark in order to finish sentences before her waking son can interrupt.
 

Come June, I send the agent pages on a Thursday, and she signs me the following Saturday, has an auction that week, and a few days later—while I’m chopping basil for supper—I hear the overnight envelope with payment hit my porch.
In the steamy kitchen, I draw the check out and sit studying it before I even throw pasta in the bubbly water. It’s in no way a massive check, but it’s the biggest I’ve ever seen, and it’s fallen from the sky just in time to get us through the summer, plus making a down payment on a used Toyota.

 

With Karr now husbandless, but sober, childrearing and career on track, the latter part of the memoir is spent movingly on Karr’s relationship with her mother and sister, as she nervously awaits their generous blessing on her memoir—which tells their stories, too, after all. The book, she writes modestly, as if we didn’t know, “was a sleeper hit … I was shocked to find that now bookstore crowds wrapped around the block as I signed till my hand cramped. Mail flooded in. Magazines would pay me astonishing sums to write a few thousand words. Lecia and Mother were wild with glee, my sister joking that I’d never have to call collect again.”
 

 

Soon enough, however, following her mother’s death, it’s only her sister whom Karr is able to call collect or otherwise. “I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her,” Karr writes about her mother. “She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.”
 

 

While Lit is certainly a success story the likes of which most writers will never experience, it’s more a story of faith and resilience. A story as much about failure as it is about success—the failures that one must endure and somehow overcome in order to make success (never quite what one thinks it will be) possible. Karr is quick to point out that life hasn’t really changed all that much for her, describing herself still standing around a Little League field “with a clipboard and a whistle around my neck,” living, apparently, by the alcoholic’s credo, One day at a time.
 

 

While Karr is certainly in a very different place than she was earlier on in the book, she is anything but the smug writer who thinks she now has it mostly figured out. Karr doesn’t give the impression that she’s been found, more that she’s just less lost. She writes near the end that there are still days “when through fear and egoism I shake my fist at the sky, afterward feeling silly and worn out as a toddler post-temper tantrum.” But then there are others, she says, when “we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we’re formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.” [MARCH/APRIL 2010]

 

Managing editor Chris Newbound teaches creative nonfiction writing at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Read his blog, and other writing, at www.berkshireliving.com.
 

THE GOODS
Lit
By Mary Karr
HarperCollins
www.harpercollins.com