Omni Daily Crush: "Lit"

I often turn memories over in my mind, wondering what they'd look like if I had an alternative way of seeing them, in prose or poetry or performance, even. But when I've tried to record memories, purely for the sake of comparison, I'm usually disappointed. I'll take this opportunity to say it's because I'm no Mary Karr, and truthfully, few people are. She's long been credited for the now overwhelming popularity of a kind of memoir that--if I had to find one common denominator--recounts awful things. But reading Lit, I have to set her far apart from most of the writers who fall into that camp.

Formally, she's outstanding, and I wasn't prepared for it, because I haven't read her earlier genre-busting books, or--regrettably--any of her poetry (yet), and because I'm probably a little jaded by memoirs I've read and didn't end up caring about. That sounds caustic to my own ears, but there are memoirs that seek sympathy or shock value, instead of finding the story. But that is where Mary Karr shines. Going into this book, I expected the facts of her adult life to wallop me, but this book isn't really about being an alcoholic, or a writer, or a person who got sober and found God. It's about stories. The ones we hear, the ones we tell, the ones we swap and live through and fabricate and wish for. There's record of personal history here, but it comes across almost as an afterthought, because she unearths the stories beneath the facts and lets them be like points on a map: one story to another to the next, taking her back and forward, for better or worse. The result is a book that's incredibly absorbing and smart, and at times absurdly funny, tender, and wise. She's got this wonderful scrappy sense of humor, and she's as generous with that as she is judicious with every word--which shouldn't have surprised me: she is a poet, after all, and every word counts.

Speaking of that, one of the things I most enjoy about Lit are the lines that introduce each chapter. For me, they established instant trust: I like being in the hands of a writer who delights in what she reads and finds inspiration in it, so much so that those voices become a natural chorus as her own stories unfold. I'll leave you with my favorite so far. --Anne

I wanted to be a rain salesman,
carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door,
selling thunder, selling the way air feels after a downpour,
but there were no openings in the rain department,
and so they left me dying behind this desk--adding bleeps
subtracting chunks--and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms,
some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living.
    --John Engman, "Work"

Recommended for fans of The Liars' Club and Cherry, as well as Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett