{"id":6188,"date":"2011-03-04T13:13:16","date_gmt":"2011-03-04T18:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/?p=6188"},"modified":"2013-05-10T15:20:28","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T19:20:28","slug":"april-30-2010-mary-karr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/2011\/03\/04\/april-30-2010-mary-karr\/6188\/","title":{"rendered":" Mary Karr"},"content":{"rendered":"
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MARY KARR<\/strong> (speaking to students): Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.<\/p>\n

JUDY VALENTE<\/strong>, correspondent: Mary Karr talks about her love of poetry with students at a writers\u2019 conference in Michigan.<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong> (speaking to student): Hello, honey-bun.<\/p>\n

VALENTE<\/strong>: Karr was known mainly as a poet until her coming-of-age memoir, \u201cThe Liars\u2019 Club,\u201d became a bestseller in the 1990s. It was the vivid story of a sometimes hilarious but often brutal Texas childhood.<\/p>\n

\"post01-marykarr\"(speaking to Mary Karr): Here\u2019s a snapshot of your past, the past that you write about: troubled family life, unstable childhood, alcoholism, divorce, depression, near suicide. Who is Mary Karr today?<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong>: Well, it\u2019s really been uphill since all that.<\/p>\n

VALENTE<\/strong>: Karr reveals the rest of her story in a new memoir, a story summed up in its title \u201cLit\u201d\u2014as in lit from within by the literature she grew up with, by alcohol and drugs, and finally lit by a faith she found unexpectedly in the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong> (speaking to writers\u2019 conference): No one in the Catholic Church hired me as a spokesperson, nor would they. I\u2019m sure I\u2019m not the pope\u2019s favorite Catholic, nor is he mine.<\/p>\n

VALENTE<\/strong>: Karr grew up amid the hardscrabble oil fields of East Texas. Her father drank himself to death. Her mother was married seven times.<\/p>\n

\"post02-marykarr\"KARR<\/strong>: I\u2019m somebody who really does feel like I was snatched out of the fire and found something in myself that\u2019s luminous and gives me ballast.<\/p>\n

VALENTE<\/strong>: The road to faith was a long, hard climb for someone who once described herself as an \u201cundiluted agnostic.\u201d By her mid-thirties Karr\u2019s life had begun to unravel. Her marriage was failing. She drank heavily, wrecked the family car, was hospitalized for an emotional breakdown. In desperation, she took a friend\u2019s advice and reluctantly began to pray.<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong>: I would kind of bounce on my knees, and I would say, \u201cHigher power, please keep me sober today\u201d\u2014whatever they told me to say\u2014and then at night I would say, \u201cThank you for keeping me sober today,\u201d and then I started to express myself, which was often, you know, with obscene gestures, double-barrel at the light fixtures.<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong>: Karr was newly separated and trying to stay sober when her five-year-old son asked her to take him to church.<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong>: And I said why, and he said the only sentence he could have said that would have gotten me to church. He said, \u201cTo see if God\u2019s there,\u201d and I thought, \u201cOh. Okay.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"post05-marykarr\"VALENTE<\/strong>: Karr took her son to various churches, a process she dubbed the \u201cGod-o-rama.\u201d She would sit with a paperback and a cup of coffee while he searched for God.<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong>: We got out, and we got in the car, and he\u2019s buckling his seatbelt, and I said, \u201cSo was God there?\u201d And he\u2019s like, \u201cWell, yeah,\u201d like where were you? So that was when I decided that, for him, we would find a place of worship.<\/p>\n

VALENTE<\/strong>: Karr says she still equated most organized religions with something people just did socially. Then one day she passed a Catholic church in Syracuse, New York, where she was teaching. She was struck by a banner out front. It said, \u201cSinners Welcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong>: I thought I had a better shot at becoming a pole dancer at 40, right, than of making it in the Catholic Church, and I think what struck me really wasn\u2019t the grandeur of the Mass. It was the simple faith of the people. For me this whole journey was a journey into awe. I would just get these moments of quiet where there wasn\u2019t anything. My head would just shut up, and I knew that was a good thing. And also the carnality of the church: there was a body on the cross.<\/p>\n

VALENTE<\/strong>: Father. Bruno Shah, a Dominican friar, is a close friend who has written about Karr\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

\"post03-marykarr\"FR. BRUNO SHAH<\/strong>: In the Catholic Church above the altar one sees the cross with the body on it. The body is there. The corpus of Christ is there bleeding, still in the midst of the world, and that\u2019s I think really what got to her\u2014her experience of being a sinner, her experience of being a sinner and recognizing that this does not distinguish her from anybody else in the world.<\/p>\n

VALENTE<\/strong>: Many of her recent poems reimagine the life of Christ. She sees in poetry a form of prayer.<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong>: Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else\u2019s suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.<\/p>\n

VALENTE<\/strong>: Karr has been sober for twenty years, but she still prays to keep her demons at bay.<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong>: I don\u2019t have very much virtue now. It\u2019s really all of it is grace for me, all of it is given. I\u2019m a very venal. I want to eat all of the chocolate and snort all of the cocaine and kiss all the boys.<\/p>\n

\"post04-marykarr\"FR. SHAH<\/strong>: The fact that this person would turn around so drastically is compelling. She sees all the alcoholics who don\u2019t make it. She sees all the good chances that have been given to her for no good reason, and she asks in wondering thanksgiving to God, why me? And that\u2019s a great testimony to her faith and to the authenticity of her conversion.<\/p>\n

VALENTE<\/strong>: A conversion she says transformed every aspect of her life.<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong> (speaking to writers\u2019 conference): My goal in writing about my faith wasn\u2019t to proselytize, even though I did feel called in prayer to write about it, but to try to make a bridge between people who had been, like myself, completely unbaptized, completely without faith, a bridge between that and to bring them into the experience of faith.<\/p>\n

VALENTE<\/strong>: Karr says she hopes her turbulent past provides more than just a good story but also sends out a message of hope to others. With her characteristic wry humor, she still refers to herself as a \u201cblack-belt sinner,\u201d but a lucky one nonetheless.<\/p>\n

KARR<\/strong>: I\u2019ve never contended that I had a really horrible life. I feel like Jesus does like me better than he does all of you.<\/p>\n

VALENTE<\/strong>: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I\u2019m Judy Valente in Grand Rapids, Michigan.<\/p>\n

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