Lit: A Memoir

"Whereas my progress was from religion to addiction, Mary Karr’s was the other way around. She’s a practising Catholic and I’m an atheist. But though our world-views are in some ways profoundly different, few books have enriched me as a reader and a person more than hers. She’s one of the living masters of the memoir form. 1995’s The Liars’ Club , which describes her extraordinary and troubled family—her mother would sometimes joke about the time she left bullet holes in the kitchen wall by trying to shoot her daughters—is a stone-cold classic of autobiographical writing. Karr arrived with a unique literary voice that combined rich Texan and burst of lyricism. And she had an almost miraculous ability to portray her broken family with wit and love, without ever flinching from pain. 2000’s Cherry picked up the story by showing Karr as an adolescent, already dabbling with drugs and profoundly lacking any sense of belonging. 2009’s Lit is the volume that deals with Karr’s alcoholism and desperate search for recovery. It can be read alone, but why would you want to miss out on reading all three in order? Although the first two volumes aren’t overtly about Karr’s addiction, they show its makings in her traumatic home life and a lost adolescence. “People whose lives are in crisis are rarely the most sophisticated readers” Lit opens with Karr on the cusp of adulthood. Although she makes faltering progress in building a simulacrum of grown-up life, her relationship with alcohol—“I had an appetite for drink, a taste for it, a talent”—steadily overtakes everything. By the end of her drinking she is reduced to crouching on a stairwell outside her apartment, glugging whisky with her one-year-old son and failing marriage inside. But even more than how it captures the bleakness of alcoholism, what I most value in this book is how she narrates her recovery with such brutal honesty. This is no joyful, linear skip towards sobriety and redemption. Karr gets sober and relapses, again and again. She spends time on a psych ward. She keeps showing up to 12-step meetings, even when they do nothing for her. Her breakthrough arrives as much through exhaustion as some kind of epiphany. She discovers in Catholicism a spirituality that makes sense to her and seems to keep her sober, but she doesn’t proselytise or become too holy for irony. Instead she presents herself as a kind of Godly schmuck, chronically slow on the spiritual uptake. For readers who’ve followed her over three searingly honest books, where survival let alone redemption often seemed unlikely, her final discovery of a bruised and hard-won peace feels like an instance of what can only be called grace."