Mary Karr’s “Lit” up for discussion

Memoirist Mary Karr will join Readers & Writers on the Air on September 25 at 11 am to talk about her latest work, Lit, third in a series that began with the bestselling The Liar’s Club.

If you missed The Liar‘s Club when it came out in the mid-90s, there’s still time to read it, as well as the second of Karr’s memoir installments, Cherry, before we dive into Lit. I remember reading The Liar’s Club and thinking, “Well, if this is memoir, maybe I’ll read more.” Up until that point, memoir–particularly written by people under the age of 75–seemed like a pretentious exercise by people who simply hadn’t lived long or deeply enough or had a meaningful impact on the world around them, to earn my interest. Read Lit first so you can dive into the conversation here. It won’t ruin the impact of the earlier installments–each stands alone, each packs a real punch.

Thanks to Philip LaMarche at SUNY Canton, Mary Karr will be giving a reading on September 25 at 7:30 pm in the Kingston Theater. Stay tuned for details about when Mary will join us on air for a conversation and call-in. In the meantime, use this space to talk about the book and raise questions we may want to ask Mary when she’s in the studio.

Here’s a brief bio from Karr’s publicity release, and there’s more here.

Mary Karr’s first memoir, The Liar’s Club, kick-started a memoir revolution and won nonfiction prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, it rode high on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, becoming an annual “best book” there and for The New Yorker, People, and Time. Recently Entertainment Weekly rated it number four in the top one hundred books of the past twenty-five years. Her second memoir, Cherry, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, also hit bestseller and “notable book” lists at the New York Times and dozens of other papers nationwide. Her most recent book in this autobiographical series, Lit: A Memoir, is the story of her alcoholism, recovery, and conversion to Catholicism. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays. Other grants include the Whiting Award and Radcliffe’s Bunting Fellowship. She is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.

Join the discussion of “Lit” by Mary Carr on its book discussion page.

Listen to Karr’s 9/25 broadcast on Readers & Writers