Lit

With Lit, Mary Karr winds up a trilogy of memoirs that includes The Liar’s Club, about her small-town Texas childhood, and Cherry, about her adolescence. In her latest literary confession, which covers her booze-soaked early adulthood and the sobriety that follows, the author continues to delight with her signature dark humor and pitch-perfect metaphors. Here, she guides us through her college years as an insecure, budding poet, and then into her doomed-from-the-start marriage to a blue-blood writer who refuses, no matter how broke they get, to dip into his family’s wealth. Shortly after they have a son together, Karr descends into serious alcoholism, and the family begins its slow but certain splintering. Meanwhile, Karr’s eccentric, recovering-alcoholic mother darts in and out of the picture, eliciting exasperation and heart-wrenching empathy in equal measure—a testament to the author’s staggering ability to write about her family with range and honesty.

Karr’s prose moves at a quick and seductive clip, delivering large doses of wit and painful insights about addiction. Also impressive is her ability to conjure the sensations of blackout stupors and the resulting hangovers; she writes of her body being “a sandbag,” her eyelids split open “like clam shells,” her mind’s vertigo as “a marble looping around a barrel.” Sure, there are plenty of memoirs about being drunk, but this one has Karr’s voice—both sure-footed and breezy—behind it. Even after she sobers up, she continues to be an uninhibited force: When short-term boyfriend David Foster Wallace breaks her coffee table during an argument, she sends him a bill.

Of course, as in most recovery stories, Karr delves into the more banal getting-sober stuff—the AA manifestos and the search for a higher power. The author is clearly self-conscious about her embracing of religion, but she couldn’t quite keep that part of the tale—approximately the last third of the book—from becoming a bit dowdy and plodding. Still, even when Karr is writing about church, Lit has enough flashes of brilliance to keep you under its intoxicating spell.—Beth Greenfield

Karr reads Tue 3 at Barnes & Noble.

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