A review by emilyinherhead
Lit by Mary Karr

challenging dark hopeful reflective medium-paced

4.0

There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open—an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.

It took me a while to get into the swing of Mary Karr's writing style—she sometimes changes scenes or jumps ahead in time from one paragraph to the next, and if I wasn't paying super close attention when reading, I would get confused and have to go back a few sentences to reorient myself in the story. But once I adjusted, I really liked her voice. She's straightforward, unpretentious, and not too flowery in her word choices, but she can also knock the reader down with unexpected moments of profound feeling.

Lit is her memoir about being an alcoholic during the early years of her son's life, and then eventually getting sober. When I picked this one up I didn't realize that it was the third she had written (after The Liars' Club, about her early childhood, and Cherry, about her adolescence and early adulthood), so there were a few allusions to events described in her earlier works here that I missed. I would love to go back and read those first two books at some point.

Still, Lit stands well on its own and is a powerful and well-written account of how subtle and sneaky addiction can be as it gradually takes over someone's life. And it isn't all doom—Karr does an excellent job of balancing the darkness with a lot of self-aware humor and hope.