Faith & Fiction Book Group

Fourth Sunday of the month at 7:00 p.m.

On July 25, 2010, the Faith and Fiction Book Group will discuss Lit by Mary Karr (non-fiction).  This meeting will be held at the Leety residence (call the church office if you need directions).  As always, the group welcomes anyone who has read the book.

With "Lit" Ms. Karr … has written a book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won't let you go.  It's a memoir that traces the author's descent into alcoholism and her conflicted, piecemeal return from that numb hell — a memoir that explores the subjectivity of memory even as it chronicles with searching intelligence, humor and grace the author’s slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer.
— New York Times book review

Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore.  But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past.  She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide.  A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott," with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith.  Not since Saint Augustine cried, "Give me chastity, Lord—but not yet!" has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity.

Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live.  Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up — as only Mary Karr can tell it.
— Harper's liner notes