Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

      MARY KARR

       Lit

      A Memoir

PRAISE

      From the reviews of Lit:

      ‘Searing … A book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go. Chronicles with searching intelligence, humor and grace the author’s slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer’

       New York Times

      ‘A brutally honest, sparkling story’

       Glamour

      ‘Karr continues to delight with her signature dark humor and pitch-perfect metaphors delivering large doses of wit and painful insights. There are plenty of memoirs about being drunk, but this one has Karr’s voice – both sure-footed and breezy – behind it’

       Time Out

      ‘As irresistible as it is unflinchingly honest … With grace, saltiness and profanity galore, Karr undeniably re-establishes herself as one of our finest memoirists and storytellers’

       San Francisco Chronicle

      ‘In a gravelly, ground-glass-under-your-heel voice that can take you from laughter to awe in a few sentences, Karr has written the best book about being a woman in America I have read in years’

       New York Times Book Review

      ‘Dazzling … Lit reminds us not only how compelling personal stories can be, but how, in the hands of a master, they can transmute into the highest art’

       Boston Globe

      ‘Karr’s sharp and funny sensibility won me over to her previous two volumes, but what wins me over to Lit is the way her acute self-awareness conquers any hint that hers is the only version of this story. Karr is as funny as ever’

       Washington Post

      ‘Karr could tell you what’s on her grocery list, and its humor would make you bust a gut. She holds the position of grande dame memoirista’

       Los Angeles Times

      ‘A radiant, rueful, rip-roaring book … Warm enough to burn a hole in your heart’

       Entertainment Weekly

DEDICATION

       For Chuck and Lynn Pascale

       and for Dev:

       Thanks for the light.

       Passage home? Never.

      —The Odyssey, Book 5, Homer (trans. Robert Fagles)

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Praise

Dedication

Prologue: Open Letter to My Son

Side A: Now

Side B: Then

I ESCAPE FROM THE TROPIC OF SQUALOR

1 Lost in the Golden State

2 The Mother of Invention

3 Lackluster College Coed

4 There’s No Biz Like Po-Biz

5 Never Mind

II FLASHDANCE

6 Inheritance Tax Summer

7 The Constant Lovers

       8 Temporary Help

       9 There Went the Bride

       10 Bound

       11 In Search of Incompetence

       12 Bent Bender

       13 Homesick

       14 The Inconceivable Meets the Conceivable

       15 Journey of the Magi

       16 Postal Partum

       17 No Mom Is an Island

       III SELF HELP

       18 Ivy Beleaguered

       19 The Mokus Squirreliness of the Unmet Mind

       20 My Concept of Commitment

       21 The Grinning Skull

       22 Mass Eye

       23 Lather, Rinse, Repeat

       24 Affliction

       25 Reprieve

       26 The Reluctantly