Book Review: Mary Karr's _Lit_

It's ironic, or at least self reflexive, that I should come across and read Mary Carr's Lit, which chronicles, amongst other things, a sojourn in a mental hospital, while I was in such a place myself. I'm not dodging this issue, by the way: I just need to write a review of this book while it's still fresh in my head, having read its 385 pages over two days between groups and appointments and involuntary meds-induced naps and not having access to a copy of it for reference purposes.

Given those circumstances, this isn't going to be a review like reviews I submit to literary magazines. It'll be more of a quick-and-dirty. It's important for me to be reading memoirs like this, since memoir is going to be one component of my MFA thesis on which I'm embarking, and dealing with stories around health and soul-health is an important aspect of what will be memoir'd.

Lit is plastered with rave reviews, including one from no less than Michiko Kakutani on the front cover. Given this unanimous ecstasy, I was distinctly underwhelmed. In fairness, though, without that billing I wouldn't have been disappointed. The memoir is very readable, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, reflective enough that it isn't just a me-me-me (although of course it is that too).

I learned both some how tos and some how not tos from reading this book. Number one: Get a better editor! Of course that's always my pet peeve; how many books have I read, sympathizing and loving the book, and thinking about every three minutes "Can I be your editor and have you do this again?" Seriously, though, throughout the book the use of em dashes and commas is so erratic and often so ill advised that where it doesn't actually distort the meaning (which it does) it often made my eyes hurt. This being the case, it's not surprising that the whole panoply of pet peeves is out in force, from gerund use to comma splices; from sentence structure to sequence of tenses.The word "scrim" appears thrice--too many for such a word. I saw the word "Ziploc" spelled three different ways; the name "Spencer" spelled differently twice in as many lines.

The latter leads me to the biggest how not to I learned from reading this. Karr uses present tense as her main narrative tense. It's been popular to do this, the last thirty years or so, to impart a sense of vividness and immediacy. I've always been suspicious of the device because I've always loved the richness of time relationships language offers us. How wonderful, for example, that the present perfect allows for us to be in a present state as a result of a past action (I have arrived~I came here and am here now). But in this book, the present tense for narrative really doesn't work. It's not just a matter of making the narrative feel one-dimensional, lacking time relationships. There are many sentences structured something like "A few days after the funeral, she is walking down the street..." This may not look too bad out of context, but the first part is past tense solidly, and the present tense right after can only be unnatural. I don't have examples from the text, but there were many that were jarring indeed.

Some of these jarring instances, however, were created by what's probably the biggest how to of the book for me, which is that Karr reflects as a present time writer on the narrative of her past and inserts these reflections into the narrative. Present time writer and past time experiencer really requires past tense narrative. However, these reflections are probably the most special thing in the book, especially when she gives glimpses of the process of writing the book: not wanting to spend too much time on an episode, wishing a character had signed off on her version of events, choosing a pseudonym or pseudonymous location for an event. These reflections show that the author has her reader in mind and understands what a reader might want to know about, but also is aware of herself both as writer and experiencer--her privacy and the ways in which she wishes to present information are part of the relevant material.

I haven't read Karr's two earlier memoirs--and what's up with THREE memoirs?? But I was at a disadvantage for it. In at least one place, Karr summarizes material from an earlier memoir, but even apart from that there were enough untied ends that it was clear that material presented elsewhere was being assumed. Editorial and present tense problems aside, this may be the biggest problem with the memoir: it doesn't stand alone. But calling this a problem may be simply a matter of perspective. What single work of any writer stands alone? I still wish there weren't so many untied ends, though. 

Their presence prevents me from knowing whether a lack I see in the storytelling would be solved by supplying it from an earlier memoir or if it really is missing. The problem is this: The memoir is dealing with Karr's finding sobriety after years of drunkenness and depression--specifically sobriety via Alcoholics Anonymous, with a kicking-and-screaming arrival at trust in a Higher Power which finally leads her to Catholicism. Now, the book contains plenty about the wretchedness of being a desperate addicted alcoholic trying to claw her way out of an unbearable life situation, but precious little depiction of the earlier phase where drinking alcohol provides a high, exhilaration, a sense of invincibility. Even the younger Mary is at best verklempt. And yet the exhilaration and fun and adventure is referred to as something lost. Except that alcoholism runs in her family and she has pain to get away from, I just didn't feel like I got to know enough about why she became dependent on alcohol in the first place.

If I were to be writing about agreeing to take meds to control bipolar mania, I would want to talk about how mania was making life unmanageable and leading to ever deepening depressions for sure, but I would also want to talk about the experience of the manic high and why it is so hard to give up.  

One last comment, which sort of fits under the information not disclosed rubric: Karr sure makes an awful lot of comments about weight and thinness. She even lists thinness as the number one reason for why she's not the most suffering of afflicted people--ahead of being white, intelligent, HIV-negative... She mentions her own weight going up and mostly down, repeatedly, and depicts herself denying herself food and forcing herself to exercise. The anorectic in the mental hospital is the only one referred to as beautiful, consistently.  So what next? A memoir about her eating disorder? Not meaning to be mean...but it seems like there's something there and she's playing it coy.

And now I'm going away to think more about why this was such a quick and easy and even compelling read for me, even though aspects of the crafting drove me crazy and I didn't especially care about the character. If I could figure that out, I'd really know something about the intangibles of good writing. Answers in the comments, please! (As well as please tell me what to do about the 13,907 comments waiting for me here, all of them likely spam save maybe a half dozen?!)