Mary Karr: Her New Memoir is Called "Lit"

The summer of 2003 I went to Prague for a month of writing classes and perfunctory castle tours and, when that got old, make-out sessions with near strangers, but before any of this happened I landed on that city and almost immediately met Mary Karr. Embarrassing as this is, she was the only writer involved in the Prague Summer Program who I'd ever heard of before. Not that this mattered, of course, because you may be able to tell from the sentence above that I really wasn't there to work on writing. On the first day of workshop, our poetry professor Aliki Barnstone asked everyone to go around the room to say something about their oeuvre, their style of writing, and I simply said, "I'm a genre whore." This line makes me want to puke now, but Aliki and my classmates loved it. They called me Wild Woman, and they weren't surprised weeks later when I showed up to class late in the same clothes they'd last seen me in because I didn't go home the night before. My half-blind metro ride back to Charles University that morning is something to be explored in a different blog.

Back to Mary Karr. I got to Prague and I loved her. Before I got the chance to wonder whether or not I'd get to meet her I did, just like that. There was a big party at a dark bar for the writing program participants. Pot was blithely passed around which was of course titillating. I knew smoking and possession were legal (the technical law term was "in small doses"), but it was still a turn-on to imagine the Prague police were going to bust in any moment and we were all going to Prague Pot Prison. Obviously whatever got passed to me was some good shit.

Then my friend Ashley, without whom I could not have survived Prague, led me to a table of writer adults and there sat The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Mary Karr, and our LSU sometime-poetry-professor (and now dear friend) Andrei Codrescu. I pretended to know Andrei and said some words to him while staring at Mary. She was about 50 at the time but looked 20--the woman was stunning. She knew it and I didn't care.

It might help you to know I was in a rather chunky body phase at the time, which means my boobs were two cup sizes larger than normal. Also then, as now, I had no approach to fashion and was wearing one of those hideous American Eagle graphic baby tees with a bike on it, over which was inlaid the words, Wanna go for a ride?

The tee was tight. The bike was stretched long across my chest.

Mary Karr looked at me and said, “Wow, nice shirt. Can I borrow it sometime?”

I was so high already and drunk on Gambrinus I could hardly respond, and didn't actually. Instead I whispered loudly to my friend Ashley, “Ohmigod Mary Karr wants to borrow my shirt! What do I do?” We found some way to weasel out of there before I could do the obvious and literally give her the shirt off my back, and we met some boys, most of whose names I've forgetten, but I've always remembered that moment with Mary Karr because it was my instance of being starstruck (followed only by meeting Sean Penn and Chuck Todd).

For a year at that point I’d been in love with her, and if you’ve read The Liar’s Club you’re in love with her to. In the book she writes about possibly the most difficult childhood one can imagine: two alcoholic parents, one of them a hysterical mother who tries to murder her, horrible sexual abuse by a neighborhood bully and a babysitter, cold grandparents who can only sigh at the situation--all this by age nine. Her life was so incredibly fucked nearly from the start of it, but she presents it in such a pitiless, extraordinarily beautiful way. The first wonder is that she survived her life. The second is that anyone can present anything--especially such misery--in the unparalleled way she does. To love her writing is to hate her, because immediately you can recognize what you can never do.

However.

Yesterday I heard her interview with Terry Gross on NPR and I wonder how much has changed within the last six years: now I hate her. It’s not just because this last half-decade’s newfound Catholicism, which admittedly I found strange. In The Liar’s Club she’s a smart agnostic, like her father, which I thought nicely mirrored my smart agnosticism, along with my father’s.

It's not just because her new memoir, Lit, is about her struggles with alcoholism, and how I've got this terrible habit of rating the severity of people's drinking problems because I feel I've seen some of the worst in history. So I shake my head in sad amazement when she tells Terry, "I didn't want to stop drinking. I wanted to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted."

I thought, "Bitch! Real alcoholics want to stop, but it's their bodies that say no, you need a drink, if you don't, you'll have a heart attack." Yes, I've already written in another blog about how I recognize that there are many different kinds of alcoholics. But the nature of Mary's comments suggested to me that her dire alcoholic troubles were a facade masking the professional troubles of writing another memoir. (By the way she is not just any memoirist, she is one of the best selling of all time. And book publishers remember this, and pay big bucks, and are impatient.) Her first two were about her childhood, and now she had to construct one about her adult life. And I can just imagine her thinking of the ways she's fucked up as an adult and landing on something easy: ah, alcohol! I drank it, thus, am alcoholic, thus, have subject. Think plus type plus bind equals third memoir.

Her glibness in the interview also wasn't very endearing. It seemed she'd told the stories she was telling Terry quite a lot, so while she was always witty there was something false about it. Here's what she has to say about meeting her very rich (now ex-) husband's parents for the first time:

“Oh Terry, you could've lowered me onto an island with the peace-loving Tasaday and I would’ve been more comfortable than I was with the WASPs.”

The Tasaday. Really, Mary? Just pulled that obscure Phillipino tribe off the top of that well-read, highly-cultured, intellectual brain of yours? I have to believe that smart people, well-read people, don't talk like that because I don't. And I want to be smart and well-read, too! But my reference would have probably included being dumped into Thailand on the set of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge, and of course my clear worry is that this makes me dumb.

Here is how she described being raised by a sometimes-terrible human being like her mother:

“We [Mary and her sister] were like lizards in a terrarium who, every few weeks, my mother tapped the glass to see if we were still alive.”

Of course the metaphor is sad and astounding but, geez! How did she think of that just then? The thing is she didn't. She's got these incredibly smart rote answers for everything and people who do that scare me because I can't conjure many insights even with all the time in the world (the time it takes to write this, for example).

What probably pissed me off most was her pontification of how difficult this memoir was to write. I mean the first two were nuthin, but this one nearly killed her. The struggle, Terry, the struggle. Mary threw away three drafts of the book, hung around for weeks at a time in a bathrobe and sighed at the rafters. (I'm thinking, bitch, you have rafters! What the hell is there to sigh about!)

But listen to how she cheered herself up. "I called Don DeLillo, and I said, 'Don, what should I do? I can't finish this book!' And then a few days later Don sent me a postcard that said, 'Write or die, Mary.' And I sent one back that said, 'Write and die, Don.'"

Ho, ho. I know Don DeLillo. Howdy-fucking-do.

Then she got to call Robert Haas, of course known to her as Bob, and she sobbed into to his receiver and he consoled her because she's brilliant and beautiful, she's Mary Karr. He reminded her of this and other things, leading good to triumph over evil, thus helping her finish the book. And it's at this point in the interview that she finally admits her biggest fear in finishing a book that might be bad was the fear of not being a special writer anymore who gets to call Don DeLillo and Robert Haas and is famous and beloved. "I just didn't want to get sent back to the farm club."

So much for God, huh Mary?

But as I read over and think back on what I've written, I see that all my problems with Mary have to do with how seeing her makes me see myself. If she employs an obscure reference to make a point, it's somehow an affront to me because I'm incapable of doing the same. If she gets to call Bob Haas, I'm upset because I'll never get to call Bob Haas (whose Field Guide was too erudite to change my life--as I was just about to lie and tell you--but was beautiful nonetheless. I'm smart enough to know that much.).

Maybe hating her now is a reflection of how I feel about the then-Brooke, the 22-year-old Brooke who met Mary. I got this amazing opportunity to go to another country, explore Europe if I wanted, learn important things from important writers, but instead I spent the whole time drinking and smoking and getting lost on the way home from strange expatriate's houses. The 22-year-old Mary was ambitious, smarter, ready to take on the literary world, and if she'd gone to the Prague Summer Program with me at that age she would not have made out with strangers, she would've seen all of the important things to see, she would've written the best poems in the class, she would've already been what I still long to be: a Real Writer.

Or maybe she would've done like I did, and just gotten lit.