|
List Price: $14.99
Our Price: $9.99
Your Save: $ 5.00 ( 33% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Written By: Mary Karr
|
Average Reader Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780060596996
Feature: ISBN13: 9780060596996
ISBN: 0060596996
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: 2010-07-01
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: 2010-06-29
Studio: Harper Perennial
|
|
|
Features
|
ISBN13: 9780060596996
Condition: New
Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Review:
|
The Liars' Club brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood. Cherry, her account of her adolescence, 'continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal' (Entertainment Weekly). Now Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness--and to her astonishing resurrection. Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. 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 and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint 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. 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.
|
|
|
Reader Reviews for Lit: A Memoir (P.S.):
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Couldn't put it down!
Comment: Mary Karr does it again! She is a brilliant writer, and brutally honest. Her story of emotional abuse and addiction is chilling, but very sentence is a gem. And yes, we really do talk like that in Texas.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Little more than a well-written drunkalog
Comment: I read this book at the insistence of one of my dearest friends, who was certain that I would love it, as I, like the author, have recovered from alcoholism. Ah, the naivete of my friend, who obviously hasn't sat through the several thousand AA meetings I've been to in my life. While this story might seem fresh and interesting to the uninitiated, in reality is it little more than a standard-issue AA story of drinking and redemption...an entertaining, if predictable, yarn in which the past seems a little too irredeemably bad and the present slightly too good to be true. Such stories are indeed compelling the first couple of hundred times one hears them, but after a while one begins to realize that they are actually all one, homogeneous dramatization having little to do with reality.
The only thing that sets this story apart from a typical AA drunkalog is that it is told in an organized fashion, in literate form, and with at least an appearance of introspection (although the results of such introspection end with the oh-so-predictable AA conclusion that it is all worth it if one ends up having A Spiritual Experience). Other than that, I could see this show in a church basement any night of the week.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Lit Is a Lovely Read
Comment: I loved reading Mary Karr's other memoirs so I was excited when this one came out. Unfortunately, it took me until now to get to it.
Lit, Karr's latest memoir, details her struggles with alcohol, her road to sobriety and her converstion to Catholicism. The focus is on her early years as a writer and young parent and how alcohol impacted those things as well as contributed to the dissolution of her marriage. Timeline wise, this book takes place 9 years after the events discussed in Cherry, Karr's coming of age memoir. The story begins with Karr as a teenager and then as a college student, then as a poet and grad student and finally her family life.
I loved this memoir. There were some parts of it that really struck home for me as a young parent - especially when Karr details the impact of her drinking on her son in particular. It was poignant and touching and emotional and raw, but eloquent and wonderful at the same time. She's also really meticulous and frank in her descriptions and stories. Karr doesn't spare the reader or herself the memories and the pain and the other emotions that are attached to her struggles. She excellently conveys the tension that she experiences between her heart/emotion and her brain/intellectualism in a way that very few authors could do.
Karr's story is inspiring and wonderful and a must read for all.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Poetry of Despair
Comment: Mary Karr's third memoir is an amazing blend of beauty, despair and unflinching insight. Her descent into and out of alcoholism is recounted in a style of writing that lets the reader see both the worst and the best of what human nature is capable. Oh yes, and she's a damn good writer as well. Most highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Lit.. Hard to be happy.
Comment: Depressing for a summer lite read. But,informative of what alcoholism looks like from the inside...out. Her mother stories made me very sad!
|
|
|
|
|
|
