Book of the week: Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr

(Harper, 386 pages, $25.99)

The “grande dame” of contemporary memoir writing is back with a new book, Lit, that reminds us why memoirs became so popular in the first place, said Samantha Dunn in the Los Angeles Times. Fourteen years after Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club created a template for transforming a rough childhood and youthful bad behavior into literary gold, the Texan-born poet is finally offering her fans a tour of her less-than-perfect adulthood. Her material this time is routine stuff, given the genre: a failed marriage, alcoholism and motherhood, a brief institutionalization, and, finally, recovery and professional success. But Karr could write about “what’s on her grocery list” and her humor and “pitch-perfect command of our American vernacular” would still “take your breath away.” Memoir writing turns out to be poetry’s closest cousin: “The subject of the story doesn’t matter as much as the self-awareness and craft of the writer ­telling it.”

Karr knows how to use words “to make a reader see or feel or view something prosaic afresh,” said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. To Mary the teenager, drinking whiskey is akin to feeling “a poof of sequins” that are “sparkling through my middle.” To Mary the young alcoholic mother, enduring the final months of her marriage to a Waspy New England poet is like watching her husband constantly finger an invisible eject button.

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Under the circumstances, she writes, “I dwindle and shrink like a spider on a coal.” Even as Karr’s drinking becomes harder to forgive, her “darkly humorous voice” remains “irresistible,” said Melanie Gideon in the San Francisco Chronicle. Largely, that’s because Lit is the story of “a woman seeking a lifeline.”

In fact, the book’s only letdown comes when she grabs that lifeline, said Melissa H. Pierson in BarnesandNobleReview.com. After bristling for years about Alcoholics Anonymous’ insistence that recovery depends on the addict’s embracing a “higher power,” our “tough-talking intellectual” converts to Catholicism and is saved. But conversions are internal. Even a writer as talented as Karr can’t make the event palpable. The book thus ends with the quiet whisper of an insular experience, not a satisfying dramatic climax. Still, it’s not as if Karr sheds all her prickly appeal, said Mollie Wilson O’Reilly in Commonweal. Her eventual testimony on behalf of God, and even prayer, is powerful precisely because “it’s wry and knowing.”