ON NEW YORK magazine’s article about
Mary Karr’s new memoir Lit, a commenter on the website writes,
“Unfortunately, now that she’s ‘found God,’ I no longer have any
interest in what she has to write. Really. There is nothing more BORING
than the late-life convert.”
It’s a sentiment that ordinarily I’d agree with. (Even the witty,
irascible Anne Lamott grew complacent and dull after one too many books
about God.) In fact, I’d take it one further—by rights, I
shouldn’t have any interest in memoirs exploring childhood family
dysfunction and sexual abuse (Karr’s first memoir, The Liars’
Club) or a rebellious adolescence (her second, Cherry). Even
in a genre as indifferent to literary standards as memoir is, these are
clichés.
But Karr is so singularly badass that problems of cliché and
subject matter and the tedious ubiquity of memoir-as-genre cease to
matter. She’s the perfect memoirist, graced with a richly populated
life (Tobias Wolff and David Foster Wallace make cameos), an elegant
yet accessible writing style, and no apparent tendency toward
self-mythologizing. With Lit, Karr has officially chewed up her
entire life and regurgitated it in memoir—the book recounts
Karr’s life from late adolescence through a marriage, motherhood, an
alcoholic breakdown, recovery, and a religious conversion, finally
coming full circle with the publication of The Liars’ Club.
Most of Lit centers on Karr’s gradual realization that she’s
not going to be able to stay sober until she takes the whole “higher
power” thing seriously. In Karr’s hands, religious conversion is
pragmatic and thoughtful, a method of living life the way she wants to
live it (she does not, like Lamott, wake up to find Jesus in her
bedroom).
Karr’s The Liars’ Club is often credited (in her own press
materials, at least) with kick-starting the current memoir craze. But
before she was a best-selling memoirist, she was a poet, and her books
are simultaneously elevated by her poet’s respect for language, and
grounded in her no-bullshit Texas upbringing. (“My junior high school
principal had actually warned me that any girl aiming to be a poet was
doomed to become—I shit you not—no more than a common
prostitute.”) There are about 40 terrible memoirs on the
bookshelves for every great one—but Lit is one of the
greats.