Lit by Mary Karr is a Memoir You Have to Read

I'll admit it, I had trouble picking up Lit by Mary Karr. I had heard that the memoir was amazing by numerous reputable sources. I had even heard people call it, "the best memoir they'd ever read." But even with all this praise, I hesitated to crack its spine.

I was at the beach, the sun was shining, and I wasn't in the right frame of mind to delve into a memoir about a mother's struggles with alcoholism. But as soon as I picked it up, I fell under the spell of Karr's lyrical prose and raw honesty. She unflinchingly chronicles her relationship with alcohol beginning with her troubled childhood with her alcoholic parents to her troubled parenting of her son and her failed marriage. She describes each of her steps to sobriety and her eventual path to spirituality and literary success. Although the narrative can sometimes be harrowing as Karr bares every facet of her experience for her readers, her willingness to share her story in such a beautifully written memoir is a gift.

Who else could write about her first sip of whiskey so eloquently? This is Karr's description of sharing a drink of whiskey with her father on her first trip home from college. "The bottle gleamed in the air between us. I took the whiskey, planning a courtesy sip. But the aroma stopped me just as my tongue touched the glass mouth. The warm silk flowered in my mouth and down my gullet, after which a little blue flame of pleasure roared back up my spine. A pool of sequins went sparkling through my middle." She writes about alcohol seductively, like a woman falls in love with an abusive rogue, and makes it easier to understand alcohol addiction.

Alcoholism is often a disease passed on from generation to generation, and Karr's story is no exception. She describes that legacy poetically by saying, "Drinking to handle the angst of Mother's drinking - caused by her own angst - means our twin dipsomanias face off like a pair of mirrors, one generation offloading misery to the other through dwindling generations, back through history to when humans first fermented grapes." Karr doesn't spare any details of her parents' failings, yet I still came away with a strong sense of her love and eventual forgiveness for the hurt they caused.

I found Lit to be a powerfully inspiring memoir. I was particularly moved by Karr's recounting of her journey to literary success as she slowly began listening to her many mentors and started telling her stories without being (in the words of Toby Wolff) "afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else." She doesn't give the memoir a happy Hollywood ending, freely admitting to still being occasionally tempted to drink, but it is a powerful story of overcoming daunting odds, a story of survival.

I have been recommending Lit to anyone who will listen. I finished it two weeks ago and am still thinking about it, replaying passages in my mind, and pausing to marvel at different parts of Mary Karr's life story. I was deeply affected by this novel, inspired to take more risk to fail and be more honest in my writing. Don't be daunted by the subject matter. This is a memoir you have to read.

*I received a review copy of Lit as part of a campaign organized by TLC Book Tours.