Lit by Mary Karr
from the opening:
Now nights, I sit downstairs on the porch and stare into the black hole of the garage, which, in my childhood cosmology, was where my oil-worker daddy sat in the truck and drank himself to death. After he staggered into the house to pass out–first bumping against the sides of the hall like a train conductor–I’d go out the the garage and stand with my back to the wall, waiting for the headlights of my mother’s vehicle to come swerving up the dead-end street we lived on. Through sheer force of will, I’d draw her drunk ass home alive. Daddy was steady and stayed. Mother was an artist and left. Those two opposing colossi tore a rip in my chest I can’t seem to stitch shut.
on when she started drinking.
p. 156 from Lit
And that’s how–in some cosmic accounting of our family’s rampant dipsomania–Mother’s recovery dovetailed with the start of my own years’ long binge, for from that day forward, I drank in increasing amounts, as if our gene pool owed the universe at least one worthless drunk at a time.
after a describing a fight with her husband.
p. 96 from Lit
If we talked about the night before, I don’t recall it, which isn’t fair to either of us, for it doesn’t show our reasoned selves paring away at our scared ones. But it’s a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud. The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
p. 182 from Lit
He says, You knew I was like this when you married me.
The righteous cry of married men everywhere, for it’s a cliche that every woman signs up thinking her husband will change, while very husband signs up believing his wife won’t: both dead wrong.
p. 183 from Lit
One night I get gussied up for a book party Warren would rather have been shot than attend, and sunk in the cavern of a leather armchair, I hold my liquor enough to hear–from the mouths of poets–work I’m itching to read, books I can vanish down into from my grind. The night is a burst of sea spray washed across my face, tangible evidence of a fresh existence only slightly out of reach.
p. 241
Deb says, Mary’s reluctant to get down on her knees because she doesn’t believe in God.
I add, What kind of God wants me to get on my knees and supplicate myself like a coolie?
Janice busts out with a cackling laugh, You don’t do it for God! You do it for yourself. All this is for you…the prayer, the meditation, even the service work. I do it for myself, too. I’m not that benevolent.
How does getting on your knees do anything for you? I say.
Janice says, It makes you the right size. You do it to teach yourself something. When my disease has ahold of me, it tells me my suffering is special or unique, but it’s the same as everybody’s. I kneel to put my body in that place, because otherwise, my mind can’t grasp it.
p. 244
It’s funny, she says, how everybody else is traffic, huh?
p. 260
If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you don not cross into it whistling. There’s an initial uprush of relief at first, then–for me, anyway–a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren’t yet operational. There’s been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible. You don’t have to be Christian for the metaphor to make sense, psychologically speaking.
p. 300
Right before I hit a year sober, Joan suggests starting a women’s group for gab of some spiritual variety–think quilting bee where we stitch on each other’s souls, autopsy where the corpses take turns carving. In my office at Radcliffe on Sunday nights, we meet–about four or five sober women trying to stay that way.
Nobody operates from a formal religious construct, no church ladies or temple mavens. Joan rustles up a list of discussion topics she used in a similar group, and we start off talking about prayer. When Deb claims her regular prayer is for a joyous day filled with serenity, I say, You can ask for that?
p. 334 on taking her son to visit churches.
…And I won’t say that the venal thought doesn’t flit through me that church folk look like they might have wrenches and lawn mowers to loan.
p. 385 (closing words)
Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we’re formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential. Usually, the closest we get is when we love, or when some beloved beams back, which can galvanize you like steel and make resilient what had heretofore only been soft flesh. (Dev, you gave me that.) It can start you singing as the lion pads over to you, its jaws hinging open, its hot breath on you. Even unto death.
