A drinking life

After a scarred childhood, years of self-destruction before sobriety and the light of Catholicism

November 08, 2009|Rebecca Steinitz, Globe Correspondent

Before she wrote her first memoir, Mary Karr was already a poet. If every word matters to a prose writer, to a poet the words matter that much more. Take “Lit,’’ Karr’s dazzling new memoir, which picks up her story just after a harrowing small-town Texas childhood and adolescence.

“Lit’’ evokes the combustibility of Karr’s family, famously chronicled in her stunning debut, “The Liar’s Club.’’ That book begins on the night Karr’s mother set fire to her dolls in a moment of psychosis that begs to be read as metaphor for the insanity, alcoholism, neglect, and strange searing love which characterized her childhood (it’s surely no coincidence that Karr remembers the country ballad “Ring of Fire’’ as “my favorite song’’ on the jukebox in the bar her mother briefly owned in Colorado). Fire imagery races through “Lit,’’ and Karr repeatedly refers to what she calls “my incendiary back story,’’ as she traces the aftermath of that childhood into an adulthood during which “I keep setting fire to my life,’’ solving problems with a “flamethrower.’’

Karr leaves Texas for college in Minnesota, drops out, then earns a degree in poetry at a low-residency graduate program in Vermont (a hardly disguised Goddard College). There she falls in love with a reserved WASP poet with whom she moves to Cambridge, which is to say, about as far from home as she can get. She struggles to build a literary career and support herself, and eventually she marries the poet, despite, or perhaps because of, the cultural and emotional gulfs between them. All along, she drinks.

“Lit’’ is also, of course, slang for being drunk. While alcohol threads through Karr’s history, in “Lit’’ it becomes her story. After the birth of her son, she replaces her newly sober mother as the alcoholic parent, albeit with a desperate concern for the wellbeing of her child, which her own mother sorely lacked. As she tells the story of her descent from the occasional binge to daily degradation, Karr’s linguistic control allows her to write the well-worn alcoholic narrative anew. While a $20 glass of cognac “slide[s] down like scorched sunshine’’ and a beer’s “fizzy sip tastes of roasted grain, tidy fields waving in the wind,’’ eventually the pleasure drains away from her very words: “I keep getting drunk. There’s no more interesting way to say it.’’