2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley
$12 advance ($6 students with ID advance)
With The Liars’ Club and then Cherry, Mary Karr jumpstarted a renaissance in memoir while riding the “best book” wrap ups and bestsellers lists for years. These mesmerizing (and somehow hilarious) accounts of her apocalyptic childhood and outlaw adolescence are contemporary classics, which left her millions of readers with one persistent question: How did she overcome her feral upbringing to become an esteemed poet and professor and – perhaps harder – mother of a son who “looks like something you win at a raffle”?
In Lit, Karr brings the same relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, lacerating humor and irreverent outlook to chronicle her unlikely ascent into adulthood. Lit traces her quest for the stable family she never had growing up. Seeking safety and transformation, she marries a handsome patrician poet fleeing his own blue-blood roots. The mismatch of backwater Texan and old-money Easterner proves ill-fated, although it produces a beautiful son. With her marriage slowly unraveling and her poetry career stalled, she turns to alcohol, and in a matter of months morphs into the mother she fled Texas to escape.
Karr has to die and survive several circles of hell before an unlikely posse of saviors and saints helps her get to the electrifying path to salvation. Lit is one hilarious knockout saga
Mary Karr lives in New York City.
Meredith Maran introduces.
