Mary Karr – författare

The long awaited sequel to the beloved and bestselling ‘The Liars’ Club’ and ‘Cherry’ – a memoir about a self-professed ‘blackbelt sinner’s’ descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness, and her astonishing resurrection.‘If you’d told me, even a year before I start taking my son to church regular that I’d wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would’ve laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime? Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.’Mary Karr’s prizewinning ‘The Liars’ Club’ chronicled her hardscrabble Texas childhood and sparked a renaissance in memoir, cresting the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. ‘Cherry’, her ecstatically reviewed account of a psychedelic adolescence and a moving sexual coming-of-age, followed it into bestsellerdom. Now ‘Lit’ answers the question asked by thousands of fans: How did Karr make it out of that toxic upbringing to tell her own tale?Karr’s longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, blueblood poet who can quote Shakespeare by the yard produces a blond son they adore. But Karr can’t outrun her apocalyptic upbringing. 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 again, and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since St. 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. This hotly anticipated sequel brings Karr’s story full circle; it will endure in the hearts of readers alongside her influential and beloved earlier books. Simply put, it is a triumph.

In her celebrated essay “Against Decoration,” published in Parnassus, Mary Karr took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days and their attendant justifications: deconstruction and a “new formalism” that elevates form as an end in itself. Her own poems, she says, are “humanist poems,” written for everyday readers rather than an exclusive audience––poems that do not require an academic explication in order to be understood. Of The Devil’s Tour, her newest collection, she writes: “This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. l am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: ’The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heav’n or a heav’n of hell … I myself am hell.”

‘You’ll want to forget it and won’t be able to’ – Zadie Smith‘The essential American story’ – The Washington PostMy father comes into focus for me on a Liars’ Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can’t but write it in the present tense.Mary Karr grew up in a swampy East Texas refinery town in a volatile and defiantly loving family. In this funny, devastating, haunting memoir and with a raw and often painful honesty, she looks back at life with a painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip over into psychosis, and a hard-drinking, fist-swinging father who liked nothing better than to spin tales with his cronies at the Liars’ Club.When it was published in 1995, The Liars’ Club raised the art of memoir to a new level and brought about a dramatic revival of the form. It is a classic that paints a harsh world redeemed by Karr’s warmth, intelligent humour and finely spun prose. The Liars’ Club is both heart-stopping and heart-felt.‘Extraordinary’ – The Guardian‘Exceptionally powerful’ – The Observer‘Utterly gripping’ – The Sunday TimesPart of the Picador Collection, showcasing the best of modern literature.

In this paperback of her long-awaited sequel, we find Karr once again trying to run from the thrills and terrors of her psychological and physical awakening by violently crashing up against authority in all its forms, shuttling between the principal's office and the jail cell. Yearning, like a typical teenager, for the ideal love or heart's companion who will make her feel whole again, she throws in her lot with an varied and outrageous band; surfers, yogis, bona fide geniuses.Karr's edgy, brilliant prose careens between hilarity and tragedy. Although there are other memoirs that pay close attention to the process of self-creation and destruction that young girls go through, with all its accompanying anguish, self-consciousness and inertia, there is no one who writes about it like Mary Karr. Her prose is lustrous and cinematic, her humour earthy and irresistible. And the dramas and happenings of her life are of an intensity that few others ever experience.