Her mother likes opera and her father likes country music. In childhood Mary had been her father’s sidekick. In the midst of tending bar, the author takes time off to go to a poetry festival. Etheridge Knight reminds her of her father’s speech. Knight teaches Mary and helps her snag a job as the poet-in-residence of Minneapolis. Mary’s father had been husband five and seven to her mother.

Mary is accepted at a low-residency graduate program for poetry in Vermont. Vermont is where she meets her husband, Warren Whitbread. Geoffrey Wolff is married to Warren’s first cousin. Once, not married yet but living with Warren in Cambridge, Mary drinks sixty dollars worth of cognac at a bar. She works as a secretary days and a data-entry clerk nights. During the first years of marriage, Warren never goes to Texas for a visit. At the Whitbread house Mary is overcome with lethargy.

While Mary is pregnant she gives up alcohol and nicotine. The Whitbreads promise financial assistance. Mary learns her book of poems has been accepted by a publisher after waiting six years. Warren uses a white fog machine to sleep after the baby is born. He is working and going to graduate school. Talking to Mrs. Whitbread, the mother of six children, reminds Mary of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

When Dev is three, Mary is teaching six classes as an adjunct. She doesn’t have copying privileges, but sneaks these. Mary believes liquor shrinks her to a plodding zombie. In another section of the book she thinks ruefully that she has spent half of her life faking it, drinking. As she finally gains sobriety, Mary Karr is given a thirty-five thousand dollar prize by the Whiting Foundation.

Karr is very good on the mental traps of both addiction and sobriety. The honest portrayal of a younger self, the lack of charity exhibited, is bracing. In the author’s view, not drinking unveiled her pre-existing insanity. At a famous hospital for nervous disorders, the grounds seem grander than those of a college. Later Karr is offered a job at Syracuse University and the family moves there. Sober, the hospital experience behind her, her writing has returned.

After Karr separates from her husband, she is notifed by James Laughlin, New Directions, that her second book of poetry has been accepted for publication.
Rating: 5 / 5

Mary Karr knows how to write a sentence, but many are overheated. Her life is a complete mess although she is a literary success because of her ability to detail just what that mess is about. It used to be that only already famous people – movie stars usually – or people who experienced a well-known horrific event like the Holocaust could write tell-all books like this and find an audience.

Nowadays, it seems that we are in a kind of race for people to go public about their failures and horrific lives. Authors are battling for the title of most screwed up person who can write a book. Some of these efforts at least are literate if not literary. Ms. Karr thankfully is literate, but I wouldn’t wish her life on my worst enemy.

Lit is breezy and could be two thirds as long without any loss of impact. It’s a well told tale about an unappealing person with a laundry list of problems, some of them very tragic. I get no voyeuristic pleasure out of reading stuff like this. I can’t identify with the narrator. I just feel sorry for her. If you like lurid personal tales, this one probably will be one of the better ones out this fall. But please don’t think of wrapping it up for a Christmas/Hanukkah present for anyone with a y chromosome.
Rating: 3 / 5