The 3 best books of Mary Karr

Versatility is what it has. Of a total writer like Mary Karr we only know the aspect that has best known how to "sell" internationally as something unique. And Karr is certainly a different author because she exposes herself at all levels, she openly shows herself in a narrative that she explores and projects from her own experiences, impressions and notions about life. All in a trilogy converted into essential meta-literature of the reasons for writing.

But surely things remain in the pipeline, such as his essays or a poetic work that will evolve in parallel with that vision of the literary as an expression without any artifice, without characters or settings far from oneself. If writing is an exercise in liberation, an escape valve, an act of intimacy in form and substance, then Mary Karr is one of the authors who best understands literature.

Mary was reportedly a source of inspiration for David Foster Wallace, with whom he would share a unique narrative cosmos in the midst of a stormy relationship. The type of marginal relationships that, as is well known, can always end up leading to that void so much in need of being filled with literature or whatever ...

Top 3 Recommended Books by Mary Karr

The liars club

Who has not heard that “I have to write a novel”? There are quite a few who answer you like this when you ask them how is that going? Or what about your life? Or, in the worst case, without even having asked them.

We all have to write a novel, the one of our lives. Only knowing how to write your biography is a matter of being funny, knowing how to sift through memories and give a common thread to everything, a reason to invite someone to whom, in principle, your life is not very interesting or not at all interesting.

Mary Karr is a bulwark of memory narrative, a kind of North American literary trend. A literature where telling your life is an excuse to talk about reality, the environment that you have lived in, a region, a region, a town.

Your life then ceases to be just your life to cover itself with circumstances, customs and idiosyncrasies. And that's when the magic arises, your life can become interesting if you confront it with what happens around you while you tell it.

Mary Karr knows how to narrate what happened to her with humor, when she plays, or with the tragic tone that comes from those bad moments ... And meanwhile the world turns, Texas, her region turns, the oil wells of her town whisper while life of Mary passes ...

There is some magic in that, a special narrative capacity. Your birthday can be a soporific story..., but what do you say if that same day 25 years ago it rained heavily and you had to be isolated on a lonely road between your work and your home.

The moment could give a lot. You inside your car, evoking the moment that you will no longer experience, would there be a surprise at your house or would no one be waiting for you? The windshield vainly tries to dislodge water, like you yourself, trying to remember your childhood birthdays in the middle of a storm. Maybe you need it. The absences are what they are. She wasn't going to be waiting for you today with her smile when you opened the door. And in your waterlogged memories, on the side of a lost road, she can be in your memories...

It is also bad luck that in 19XX it starts to rain on your birthday, after months of drought, cuts in the water supply and some horrifying crops that had raised the farmers in arms ...

I don't know, there would be a lot left to enrich the description, but Mary Karr does something like that in this book The Liars' Club. Do you want to know more about Mary Karr? At the moment you only know her name, and you can search for her on the Internet, and read her information on Wikipedia, but what else would you like to know about her life, her circumstances, what has led her to be what she is?

The liars club

The flower

It seems unfading, inexhaustible. But the flower leaves, its petals fly in a gust of autumn wind. The stem is left bare in the open, shrinking and evoking irrecoverable aromas.

Who saw it coming? It is one of the fundamental questions of this book. A question about the past and the future, about identity and about that time of naivety and rebellion that is adolescence.

Who are we at twelve years old? And with sixteen? Who do we hope to be and what do we become? And even more complicated: how can we escape from what we are supposed to be? With her usual impudence, in an addictive play, fun and sexier than ever, Mary Karr writes a love letter to adolescence.

At his adolescence, because we are facing an autobiographical narrative. Never again will time stretch as in those years, never again will the world be so new, so unused, nor will our eyes be so pure. There are also doubts and fears, of course. There is loneliness and helplessness.

But thanks to passages that will make us burst out laughing and a moving and honest empathy, we read fascinated and full of hope the birth of the first true friendship, the encounter with that other person with whom we grow and discover ourselves, who we It helps us be everything we didn't know what we wanted to be.

And we are also pierced by the radiance of desire, that clear luminescence that reverberates for the first time, a profound knowledge that shakes our body until it is transformed. And we will be aware, also for the first time, of what it means in this world to be a woman and the great limitation of freedoms that it imposes on us as children.

Unsurprisingly, young Mary is not satisfied: tired of the oil town in Texas where she spent her childhood, she will join a gang of surfers and drug addicts who will face authority in a thousand ways on their way to California . "Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll," says one of the stickers on his van. Few times has a book so deeply honored this motto.

The flower

Enlightened

Is it possible to laugh out loud while reading a book that is about Love, Alcoholism, Depression, Marriage, Motherhood and… God? Of course. Iluminada is a good example, the best example. Few memoirs (with the rhythm of a great novel) live up to these pages.

The young woman who spent her hard childhood in Texas, in the bosom of a much more than "peculiar" family, lives during her early maturity a hell from which perhaps she can only be saved, in addition to literature and faith, the help of others who they went through the same thing before; without forgetting the love for her son, something that floods her at the same time that confuses her, like so many mothers.

Iluminada is written with the relentless honesty of Mary Karr, who analyzes herself unscrupulously and with irreverent humor; and he tells us about it without mincing words, without a sense of the ridiculous, and with a visceral prose that has a great power of seduction.

Iluminada is an exciting and unclassifiable book about how to grow and how to find our place in the world. There are hilarious passages and shocking passages in it, pura vida. Enlightened by literature, enlightened by the spiritual, enlightened (that is, intoxicated until losing the notion of reality) by alcohol ...

Sorrow and sacrifice become humor and promise for the future; Karr demonstrates on every page that she is truly committed to literature as an art form, not only moving but also motivating, liberating. If there is a book that can help us understand what we were, what we are and what we will be before and after crossing some desert, it is this one, exciting as a resurrection.

Enlightened
5/5 - (8 votes)

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