These elements were necessarily absent from her previous memoirs, in which there were plenty of adults to blame she is writing from a significantly different place now. She still writes with a singular combination of poetic grace and Texan verve, which allows her to present the experiences as fresh, but she also brings a potent, self-condemning honesty and a palpable sense of responsibility and regret to the narrative. The difference, though, is the way in which Karr renders these stories. Most of the scenes that unfold from here, unlike those from her eccentric childhood, are more familiar: the college student desperate to manifest her intellect the poor country girl trying to prove to her rich WASP dinner hosts that she’s worthy of their son a sleep-deprived new mom with a pot roast to cook the AA newcomer who thinks she doesn’t really have a problem the sinful skeptic arriving at faith. Quickly bored, and realizing it was a mistake to turn her back on higher education, Karr secured loans and sought the book-lined security of the college campus. The author picks up where her 2000 memoir Cherry left off-escaping her toxic childhood in small-town Texas for the California coast. Sinners Welcome: Poems, 2006, etc.) deftly covers a vast stretch of her life-age 17 to her present 50. (Nov.Acclaimed poet and bestselling memoirist Karr (English Literature/Syracuse Univ.

Fortunately, Karr's wry wit and deft prose do not render her slow conversion to Catholicism in a sentimental or proselytizing manner. What heals her most deeply, however, is when she opens herself to prayer. Years later she obtains sobriety but not mental health, and checks into a hospital after a halfhearted suicide attempt. Soon she's drinking daily at all hours, hiding it in shame. Her slow trudge toward writing success and her marriage to yet another man who comes from wealth set off her drinking in earnest. Unlike Plath, however, Karr's impulse toward self-destruction originates more from the example set by her larger-than-life, emotionally stunted parents, who were often her drinking partners. She even marries a fellow poet, a moneyed and controlling man named Warren. That poetic sensibility infuses every sentence of her story with an alliterative and symbolic energy, conjuring echoes of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and occasionally, Sylvia Plath.

Before she wrote memoirs, Karr was driven with a vagabond spirit toward poetry, whose origins she traces to the rural colloquialisms of her Texas roots. ) of her dark and drunken years as a newlywed and new mother, written to help her son get “the whole tale” of their early years together. Karr returns with her third account (after The Liar's Club

Lit by mary karr