The Fab 5 convened today for a second meeting about the book Lit. We met last week to choose books for the next 6 months (oh happy day!) and to talk about Lit, but since 3 of us had not yet finished, we postponed the Lit discussion until lunch this week. More on our book selection later.
Mary Karr's newest memoir, Lit, follows her descent into alcoholism, then her rescue by a God she disbelieved, resented and tenuously relied upon in the absence of any other prospects. Readers experience Karr as she was at each stage of the book--she does an excellent job of giving us a look at the workings of her heart, her head and her mouth through each part of the journey.
Her story is not a pretty one, and she hasn't whitewashed it for us now. I've read her memoir, Cherry, which deals with her adolescence, and the same could be said for it. This is a woman who has been damaged in so many ways, from early childhood on, that it's amazing she has survived to this point, let alone become a successful writer and professor.
Don't read this book if you are looking for a nice, uplifting and inspirational story that wraps up neatly. And don't read this book if you can't abide vulgar language--there is plenty of it.
Mary Karr is very honest about who she was, who she wanted to be, and how she got so far off track. She writes with darkness and sarcasm, with beauty and humor. The humor is the saving grace of it when she's writing about awful things. Such as when her recently sober mother fell off the wagon just in time to be high for Mary's rehearsal dinner. Mother looked at Mary's soon-to-be father-in-law, a WASPy moneyed New Englander, and "offered to paint Mr. Whitbread in the nude and quote fix anything you need fixed close quote." Her mother is a character beyond belief in Karr's memoirs, and a big part of both the agony and the crazy humor of her life.
Barbara brought up the story of Karr's first AA meeting, where she listens to a gentrified woman explaining how she hid her bottle of vodka in a turkey carcass in the freezer so that her family wouldn't find it. One night "she couldn't midwife the bottle out, so she just upended the whole bird, guzzling out of it. She says, And that was my moment of clarity, thinking, Other people just don't drink like this." How often do you find humor in someone's fight to be sober, humor that does not diminish the seriousness of the fight itself?
Karr's gift to the reader is her honesty, particularly about her spiritual journey. She describes her struggle with belief, describing each time that a different point of her own opposition to her own fledgling faith gave way. God reeled her in kicking and screaming. Good friends and advisers kept her moving forward in spite of her own resistance. Sonya pointed out that Karr's AA friends were never judgmental; they just spoke the truth as they saw it and didn't let her off the hook. And they pushed her to begin praying, which changed everything for her, much as she hated it.
None of us have read her first memoir, The Liar's' Club, and some of the references to her childhood made us curious. Nancy really wants to know what happened in Colorado. Sort of like the attraction one would have to a train wreck, Barbara says.
Lit is the story of a woman who found God when she didn't really want to, a sinner like the rest of us who had hit rock bottom and had no other way to go. Turned out she wanted to find him after all.
One last note--after weeding out many books we would like to read, we came up with the following list for the next 6 months:
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
Sarah's Key by Tatiana deRosnay
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore
Won't you read with us?
No comments:
Post a Comment