The Morning After

Book review by SUSAN CHEEVER

LIT

A Memoir

Mary Karr

386 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99

You always knew Mary Karr wasn’t telling you everything. There were tantalizing hints of adult life in her two coming-of-age memoirs, “The Liars’ Club” and “Cherry.” But “Lit” is the book in which she grows up and gets serious, as serious as motherhood, as serious as alcoholism, as serious as God. And it just makes her funnier. 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.

Memoir is the Barbie of literary genres. It exaggerates the assets and invites the reader into an intimate alternative world, sometimes complete with a dream house. We hungrily buy and read memoir even as we express contempt for it. Memoirs are confessional and subversive; memoirs drop names. Memoirs print whispered secrets on their covers in 24-point type. Memoir is so much the genre of our time that sophisticated readers look for memoirs in fiction, hunting for clues to the “real story” with a fervent appetite for details of the writer’s real life.

Great memoirists like Karr use this curiosity to entrance us with the authority of the real. Yet, remembered details have to be chosen to make scenes as revealing as if they had been imagined. When she can’t remember, Karr, now in her 50s, makes forgetting part of her story.

“The normally crisp film of my memory has, in this period, more blanks than the Nixon tapes,” she writes of the breakup of her marriage. “Maybe the agony of our demise was too harrowing for my head to hold on to, or my maternal psyche is shielding my son from the ugly bits. . . . Whatever the case, those years only filter back through the self I had at the time, when I was most certainly — even by my yardstick then — a certain species of crazy.” Yet she describes her long, sad divorce without resentment. There is no blaming in this book, no whining and no finger-pointing. Karr is not focused on what’s been done to her or on how she feels; she is focused on what she can coax you to feel.

At first, when she runs away from her childhood in Texas, from her charming drunk of a father and her homicidal drunk of a mother, Karr’s life goes well enough. She travels to California to surf and do drugs with a group of friends with names like Doonie and Quinn and Easy. By the time she is 17, she has enrolled in a Minnesota college. There, she begins to write: “Humming through me like a third rail was poetry,” she says, “the myth that if I could shuffle the right words into the right order, I could get my story straight. . . .”

A few years later, while studying for her master’s at a small college in Vermont, she meets Warren, the man she will marry — a handsome, aristocratic young poet who studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard. As she writes of her fiancé’s family home, “even the clawed furniture seems dug in to the deep nap of ancient rugs.” Although they are from different worlds, the two share a passion for language and, at first, for each other. She is a “girl starving for stability and in love with a shy, brilliant man fleeing the aristocracy he was born to,” Karr writes. But her in-laws don’t approve of handouts, and the young couple are doomed to a frustrating kind of poverty.

Until the birth of her beloved son, Dev, pregnancy and youth have kept Karr’s drinking under control, most of the time. In juggling work, mothering and her marriage, she veers toward chaos. Karr’s descriptions of what it’s like to live through even a child’s ordinary illness — “a doubled cough punctures my head like two shots from a nail gun” — will be familiar to all mothers. But even her overwhelming love for her son is set against her need for a drink. In scene after scene she describes the classic alcoholic’s promises to stop, the endless lure of just one. Soon enough her marriage is suffering. No wonder. “While Dev blanks out at the TV, I sneak around, reaching under beds and into the hamper, gathering rat-holed beer cans and wine bottles,” Karr writes. “Once Warren’s home, I . . . unload them from the hatchback like body parts into Dumpsters all over town.”

Like most drinkers, Karr begins to pick fights. There are predictable household accidents. Finally, she crashes their car. After nights of lost memories and mornings of self-loathing, Karr decides to try “the therapy group for people trying to quit,” as she calls Alcoholics Anonymous, although in accordance with the anonymity A.A. suggests, she never names it in this book. She hates everything about the program — its shabby meeting places, its cultishness, its jargon and its suggestions that she might want to think about believing in God. “What fun-house land have I crossed into, where the rich seek the counsel of the poor?” she comments after one meeting. “Any minute, some snake-handling preacher might well get up and start stomp-dancing while his underage wife passes a hat.” But she is drawn into the welcoming sober community. “I heap my watery coffee with powdered cream and stop thinking about myself long enough to come alive a little.” She reports that her friend the writer Tobias Wolff says her refusal to believe in God is like “not believing in Bob Dylan because you’ve only heard the CDs and never saw him in concert.” When friends from meetings suggest that she pray, she reluctantly agrees to try. “This an unbeliever might call self-hypnosis; a believer might say it’s the presence of God. Let’s call it a draw. . . .”

Though sober, Karr nonetheless skids into immobilizing depressions and an attempt at suicide. “If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling,” she writes. But even her breakdown doesn’t keep her from being funny. Describing checking in at McLean Hospital, where her predecessor Robert Lowell wrote of himself surrounded by “thoroughbred mental cases,” she describes her “need for custodial care at the place all Harvard spouses go. The diagnosis was underwhelming: severe depression along with insomnia and unfettered sobbing.”

In 1990, as her marriage is disintegrating, Karr is offered a teaching job at Syracuse University, and the family moves to upstate New York, where they get a golden retriever and settle into a house with a skylighted master bedroom. Her marriage has become “nights on end of cordial agony,” she writes. Finally, amicably, Warren moves out. This is when Karr begins writing the memoir that will become “The Liars’ Club” — published in 1995 to great acclaim and commercial success. “To write the stuff down is no cakewalk, since memories from that time can ravage me,” she says of the first hundred pages. “I start getting up at 4 or 5, praying to set down words before Dev comes down. . . . Some days I actually hear my daddy telling me stories.”

The seeds of her storytelling had been planted much earlier, back in Minneapolis, when the young Karr was stumbling through college. She takes a job teaching poetry at a group home for fairly functional retarded women. She loves her students’ unfiltered reactions to the power of the poem. “Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand,” she writes. “But it could blow everybody’s head off.” That ephemeral power is also packed into this very funny, very serious book.

Susan Cheever is the author of 14 books, including four memoirs; her biography of Louisa May Alcott will be published next year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Cheever-t.html