But even after her conversion, she understands why talking about her relationship with God might turn some of her audience away. Karr found escape from her self-made hell when she finally turned to religion, a topic that found its way into Lit at length. My hells are pretty much self-constructed.' I want to do all these things that aren't particularly good for me. 'I didn't quit drinking because I wanted to stop drinking. 'I didn't want to stop drinking,' Karr admits. No amount of self-awareness made her vices easier to cope with. I say it's almost like our genetic code owed the universe some really wretched alcoholic, and I stepped into the slot as she left it.' I was in my early 30s, and it's almost like she got sober right about the time my drinking picked up. 'Shortly after that, she got sober and was sober until she died, almost 80, so more than 20 years. 'My mother fell off the wagon at my rehearsal dinner,' Karr tells Terry Gross. Along the way, she grapples with her place in a lineage that she sometimes feels was preordained for disaster. Karr's new book, which follows Cherry by nine years, recounts her own descent into alcohol abuse through more family trauma and eventually her unlikely - as she describes it - conversion to Catholicism. Her followup, Cherry, mapped the author's rebellion and coming of age. Her first book, The Liar's Club, focused on her volatile relationship with her mother, who had a psychotic break while Karr was a child. Her new memoir, Lit, describes Karr's early years as a writer, wife and mother, years that were marked by drug use, drinking and the dissolution of her marriage.īurrowing into painful family stories has long been a Karr trademark. When it comes to writing about the pain of growing up, author Mary Karr isn't one to hold back.

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