I started Lit because I read that amazing article about how The Marriage Plot might be based on Mary Karr, DFW, and Eugenides himself. I thought it was fascinating how some of these literary forces orbited each other, befriended each other, and then infected each other’s writing. I decided I had to read about Mary Karr and bought Lit that very day.
Mary Karr’s Texan, slurry, strong voice is lovely and hypnotizing during the opening of the memoir. Her oscillating need for responsibility and then brazen contempt for the establishment glows from the beginning pages, she drinks gallon vodka with her mother, starts college, quits college, and does odd jobs. All the while she wants to write. She does that thing that a lot of us do, we want to write but we don’t write, we don’t know how, she doesn’t feel natural when she writes. She feels more comfortable wanting to write than putting her pain and life into poems- her father and mother’s alcoholism, her mother’s instability, her unsure childhood. She can’t write it down, and even though she’s doing fine, supporting herself, going to a poetry school, dating, she starts to unravel. She starts to drink. And this period of Mary Karr’s life is difficult for us to read about, she drinks so much it’s as though she floating above her life, above her husband and son, her pain and distance is palpable.
She decides to get help but her Texan voice gets in the way, her Texan cynicism and innate rebelliousness, and she turns to god. And this is when the book begins to get long-winded and feels less charming. Mary Karr’s writing, while still lilting and lovely, loses its charm and made me sad. She doesn’t give herself credit for getting sober, she thanks god. She doesn’t give atheist alcoholics hope, she turns into what she had previously derided, a religious member of AA, praying on her knees and going to church more than once a week. Even though I greatly admire her ability to stop drinking, to learn how to write, to raise her child, I really started to miss that irreverent, intelligent voice that I loved in the beginning of Lit, and without it, the end just dragged.
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