Editorial content for Lit: A Memoir
About the Book
THE LIAR’S CLUB brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood. CHERRY, her account of her adolescence, "continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal" (Entertainment Weekly). Now LIT follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness --- and to her astonishing resurrection.
Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott," with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, "Give me chastity, Lord --- but not yet!" has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity.
LIT is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up --- as only Mary Karr can tell it.
LIT: A Memoir © Copyright 2011 by Mary Karr. Reprinted with permission by Harper Perennial. All rights reserved.
November 2009
As I write this note, I am making lists and making piles. I leave tomorrow for the Miami Book Fair International, the fifth time I have attended this wonderful multi-day booklover's dream event. More than 350 authors will gather there to talk books this week and through the weekend. Nirvana. I travel a lot, which the Sagittarian in me just LOVES, and have made lists of what I need for day trips, short trips and long trips that I click down when packing. But somehow, the night before I still find myself up way later than I planned, adding things to my itinerary, making notes on places and people I want to see in whatever city I am headed to, winding yarn for projects to knit while traveling, deciding what books to take with me, making last-minute notes for the staff in New York, and plotting little details to make my hotel room comfortable and my trip just a bit more special.
Has your group ever organized or taken part in charity-related activities?
November 1, 2009, 308 voters
This is the season when many book festivals are held around the country. It prompts this month's question: What author or book-related events do you attend or participate in? Please check all that apply. Do you ever attend these events with all or some of
October 1, 2009, 186 voters
October 2009
On Wednesday evening I had the pleasure of seeing Jeannette Walls, the author of the mega-bestselling memoir The Glass Castle, talk about her new book, Half Broke Horses, which is just in stores this week. Before she spoke, I was invited backstage along with members of the Clinton Book Shop book club to meet her; the store was sponsoring the event. We all had read The Glass Castle and thus dropped into a conversation with Jeannette almost at mid-sentence. Each of us had different parts of the book that had resonated with us, and, though I knew none of these other women, I found myself chatting with them like we were old friends with our only bond being a book we all had read. As we shared our observations, I tried to imagine what it must be like for Jeannette to have moments like this all the time when people are talking about your work, which actually is your life.
