Works by
Mary Karr
(Poet, Writer)
[1955 - ]

Biography/Memoirs

• Cherry: A Memoir (2000)
  Mary Karr told the prize-winning tale of her hardscrabble Texas childhood with enough literary verve to spark a renaissance in memoir.  The Liar's Club rode the top of The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, and publications ranging from The New Yorker to People picked it as one of the best books of the year.  But it left people wondering: How'd that scrappy kid make it outta there? Cherry dares to tell that story.  Karr picks up the trail and dashes off into her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom.
  
  In this long-awaited sequel, we see Karr ultimately trying to run from the thrills and terrors of her sexual awakening by butting against authority in all its forms.  She lands all too often in the principal's office and--in one instance--a jail cell.  Looking for a lover or heart's companion  who'll make her feel whole, she hooks up with an outrageous band of surfers and heads, wannabe yogis and bona fide geniuses.
  
  Karr's edgy, brilliant prose careens between hilarity and tragedy, and Cherry takes readers to a place never truly explored--deep inside a girl's stormy, ardent adolescence.  Parts will leave you gasping with laughter.  But its soaring close proves that from even the smokiest beginnings a solid self can form, one capable of facing down all manner of monsters.

• The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995, 2005) -- Winner PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Best First Nonfiction
  When it was published in 1995, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, as well as bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. Now with a new introduction that discusses her memoir’s impact on her family, this unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood.

Poetry

• Sinners Welcome (2006)
  Mary Karr describes herself as a black-belt sinner, and this -- her fourth collection of poems --traces her improbable journey from the inferno of a tormented childhood into a resolutely irreverent Catholicism. Not since Saint Augustine wrote "Give me chastity, Lord -- but not yet!" has anyone brought such smart-assed hilarity to a conversion story.
  
  Karr's battle is grounded in common loss (a bitter romance, friends' deaths, a teenage son's leaving home) as well as in elegies for a complicated mother. The poems disarm with the arresting humor familiar to readers of her memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry. An illuminating cycle of spiritual poems have roots in Karr's eight-month tutelage in Jesuit prayer practice, and as an afterword, her celebrated essay on faith weaves the tale of how the language of poetry, which relieved her suffering so young, eventually became the language of prayer. Those of us who fret that poetry denies consolation will find clear-eyed joy in this collection.

• Viper Rum (1998)
  Viper Rum is Mary Karr's first book since The Liars' Club, which helped to spark a renaissance in memoir. That breathtaking autobiography about her Texas childhood rode The New York Times bestseller list for more than sixty weeks. It was hailed by The Washington Post as "the essential American story, a beauty." Critic James Atlas likened her to William Faulkner. No book by a New Directions author since Nabokov's Lolita has created such a stir. Molly Ivins remarked in The Nation, "[The Liars' Club] is so good I thought about sending it out for a second opinion.... To have a poet's precision of language and a poet's insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing gift."
  
  Now that gift returns to its origins in poetry. Viper Rum delves into the autobiographical subject matter of her two early collections (The Devil's Tour, New Directions, 1994, and Abacus, Wesleyan, 1987). Various beloveds are birthed and buried in these touching lyrics, some of which--as the title suggests--deal with drink: "I cast back to those last years/ I drank, alone nights at the kitchen sink,/ bathrobed, my head hatching snakes,/ while my baby slept in his upstairs cage/ and my marriage choked to death...." Precise and surprising, her poems "take on the bedevilments of fate and grief with a diabolical edge of their own" (Poetry). The prize-winning essay "Against Decoration," which first set off a controversy in Parnassus, serves as an Afterword. In it, Karr attacks the popular trend toward ornament in contemporary poetry: "the highbrow doily-making that passes for art today."

• Bayou: For Pete Karr (1996)

• The Devil's Tour (1993)

• Abacus (1986, 2007)