If I had called Mary Karr for an interview about her new book, Lit, it would have gone something like this:

Me: We met last year at the ODU Literary Festival; remember me? We were in the Sports Bar in the Spring Hill Suites on campus. Everybody was drinking hard liquor but us. We were sipping ginger ale. We talked about the Catholic Church, and I may have said you were prettier than your book jacket photo (which was pretty). It wasn’t a come-on. It was simply a spontaneous truth telling.

Mary: How could I forget you! Richard? Tony? Er, Michael? What a year it’s been, finishing my new book and thinking about our sipping ginger ale.

Me: [I change the subject, thinking of my own happy marriage and the pre-nuptial agreement Mary Karr would force me to sign because of the huge discrepancies between her royalties and mine]. I read the new memoir, Lit, and loved it. Tell me about it.

Mary: Lit picks up where Cherry left off, with my 17-year-old self, “stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma,” gazing at the Pacific Ocean with a group of stoned surfers I had taken on as my immediate family. The other family, the biological one in Leechfield, Texas, I was running from as if my life depended on a successful escape. But, of course, as often is the case with runaways, it was finding my family and our shared stories that saved me in more ways than one. First off, it gave me a passel of poems, and then it gave me a trilogy of memoirs that made me rich.

Me: You call your ex-husband in the book Warren Whitbread, but all I had to do was Google to find out his real name was Michael Milburn, a poet far less successful than you ( a pre-nuptial?). Why did you change his name when it was so easy to get past the flimsy firewall in the memoir?

Mary: Well, I tried to be fair and balanced, but you know what I said in the story – “The truth is, as noted, we’re inclined to gloss over our failures.” Old Warren may have turned out in the narrative to be a both tight-fisted and tight-assed. So I figured, I’d better change the name and trust that McAfee would filter things out. But I did my best to follow the advice of my literary hero and godfather, Toby Wolff. He said, “Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit…Tell your stories and your story will ne revealed…Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity. Those were hard things for me to come by, and I offer them to you for what they may be worth.”

Me: So you got engaged, fell into alcoholism and a marriage that slowly caved in, but found AA (thus your ginger ale – not mine – I’m not an alcoholic – I just like ginger ale and beautiful writers) and then you got a job at Syracuse University and had an affair with David Foster Wallace. Of course, you use only the first name, David, but I Googled again.

Mary: Are you sure you’re not an alcoholic? Doesn’t matter…David was a paradox, a chivalric throwback, all ma’ams an miz’s, shy and polite, but, as I said in the book, “David is the only guy rash enough ever to get my name tattooed on his bicep – in a heart with a banner. Even before we’ve kissed on the lips, he does this.” I sort of felt like St. Augustine when I met him– Give me chastity, Lord. But not yet. I probably should have realized that meeting a prodigy in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, rehab was not the best way to fix what was the matter with my life. My response was pitiful, I guess – “Wow, he might really like me – a thought nobody past grade five gets to have about anything bigger than a hamster.” That relationship involved a lot of broken furniture.

Me: You contemplated suicide at one point?

Mary: At a few points. As I said, “suicide is an idea that seeps into your lungs like nerve gas.” It seemed like a good solution to all my problems. I thought, “death – now, there’s a one-stop shopping idea.”

Me: Then you found God.

Mary: Don’t make it sound like a blind date! It’s easier to say and be convincing about conversion or redemption if you don’t use His name….

Me: [Ah, so she does have a thing with not naming guys] And?

Mary: I started going to Catholic Church with my son, Dev, and my former teacher and then colleague Tobias Wolff. This is a book about finding faith, but I hope that my spirit and prose style are closer to Thomas Merton’s than they will ever be to Pat Robertson’s. My salvation didn’t come with thunder and lightning or any deep voice like Chuck Heston’s. Remember what I said in the book? “In the end, no white light shines out from the wounds of Christ to bathe me in His glory. Faith is a choice like any other.” So I came to terms with my father’s death and my mother’s craziness, my divorce, my inherited alcoholism, and I started to believe in prayer. I began to forgive myself for the days when “premenstrual self-loathing [had transformed] me into a ring-tailed, horn-honking, door-slamming bitch.” I started to listen to St. Francis’s admonition, seeking not so much to be consoled as to console, to understand rather than be understood, to love rather than to be loved.

Me: If St. Augustine were a woman and had the tornado-like childhood experience you did in Shiteating, Texas, and a penchant for razor-edged metaphors with a Western twang, then he would have written Lit about his coming-to-faith. And did I tell you how pretty you are.

Mary: Thank you, Richard. You’re kinda’ cute too.

Michael Pearson, aka Richard, teaches Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University.

Lit by Mary Karr
Harper Collins Publisher
386 pages; $25.99