“Searing…A book that lassos you, hogties your emotions, and won’t let you go. It’s a memoir that traces the author’s descent into alcoholism and her conflicted, piecemeal return from that numb hell—a memoir that explores the subjectivity of memory even as it 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…Every bit as absorbing as Ms. Karr’s devastating 1995 memoir, The Liars’ Club, which secured her place on the literary map.”
New York Times
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
New York Times Book Review • The New Yorker • Entertainment Weekly • Time • Washington Post • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Christian Science Monitor • Slate • St. Louise Post-Dispatch • Cleveland Plain Dealer • Seattle Times • NBCC Award Finalist
Mary Karr’s unforgettable sequel to her beloved and bestselling memoirs The Liars’ Club and Cherry “lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times).
Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up—as only Mary Karr can tell it.
The Boston Globe calls Lit a book that “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."" The New York Times Book Review calls it “a master class on the art of the memoir” and Susan Cheever states, simply, that Lit is “the best book about being a woman in America I have read in years.""
Praise