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Lit
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Mary Karr
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
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Editorial reviews
Mary Karr’s courageous, enthralling memoir Lit chronicles in unsparing detail her struggle to accept her addiction to alcohol and her truly inspiring resurrection. But like her other best-selling memoir, The Liar’s Club, Karr expertly avoids treading into maudlin, movie-of-the-week territory. That’s because of her keen eye for detail, sharp wit, and expertly-written sentences - all of which sparkle like diamonds in Karr’s no-nonsense performance of her own carefully-chosen words.
Hearing an author read her work always adds a special thrill to the book, especially in this case. Karr is not just writing about a crucial time in her life, a time when she found her voice as a writer, got married, started a family, and everything seemed to be going her way…until her life unraveled. In Lit, Karr confides her inner-most thoughts and fears about actions and events most people would probably never confess to their parish priest. That might explain why her voice sometimes sounds annoyed or irritated. It’s like she can’t believe she actually did the things she did, looking back now as someone sober and stable.
Credit Karr for also dispelling the myth perpetuated by many mainstream movies (sorry, Crazy Heart) that most addicts magically achieve sobriety and never look back. Karr recounts with rigorous honesty one relapse after another and her serious suicidal thoughts after being sober for months and winning a prestigious literary prize. It sounds illogical, but, as Karr explains, “If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling.” Reading lines like this, Karr reveals a sweet, tender side, often concealed beneath her brassy, Texas twang.
But no matter the tone, Karr’s pitch-perfect choice of words and her sharpshooter’s eye for detail will dazzle anyone who appreciates the fine art of outstanding writing. Karr’s sure-handed voice both literally and figuratively enables Lit to transcend the factual boundaries of confessional memoirs and enter the pantheon of first-class literature. Thank you, Mary Karr, for having the courage and the craft to share with us your truly inspiring story, one spectacular sentence at a time. Ken Ross
Publisher's summary
Lit follows Mary Karr's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness - and her astonishing resurrection. Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting 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" awakens her to the possibility of joy, and leads her to an unlikely faith.
Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. It is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up - as only Mary Karr can tell it.
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- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
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These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.
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My introduction to Filipino literature and culture
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-16
By: Mia Alvar
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All We Ever Wanted Was Everything
- By: Janelle Brown
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
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A smart, comic pause-resister about a Silicon Valley family in free fall over the course of one eventful summer from the author of Watch Me Disappear and Pretty Things. When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for - until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune.
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The Perfect Life Ain't So Perfect
- By Theresa on 12-28-08
By: Janelle Brown
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Marrow
- By: Tarryn Fisher
- Narrated by: Audra Pagano
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Margo is not like other girls. She lives in a derelict neighborhood called the Bone, in a cursed house, with her cursed mother, who hasn't spoken to her in over two years. She lives her days feeling invisible. It's not until she develops a friendship with her wheelchair-bound neighbor, Judah Grant, that things begin to change. When a neighborhood girl, seven-year-old Neveah Anthony, goes missing, Judah sets out to help Margo uncover what happened to her. What Margo finds changes her, and with a new perspective on life she's determined to find evil and punish it.
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HUH?? I'm so confused LOL
- By ❤️Cyndi Marie❤️🎧Audiobook Addicts🎧 on 09-15-16
By: Tarryn Fisher
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Homesick for Another World
- Stories
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan, Richard Poe
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities.
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Funny, Dynamic Writing
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By: Ottessa Moshfegh
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Notes on a Banana
- A Memoir of Food, Love, and Manic Depression
- By: David Leite
- Narrated by: David Leite
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
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Reminiscing about the people and events that shaped him, David looks back at the highs and lows of his life, from his rejection of being gay and his attempt to "turn straight" through Aesthetic Realism, a cult in downtown Manhattan, to becoming a writer, cookbook author, and web publisher, to his 23-year relationship with Alan, known to millions of David's readers and listeners as "The One", which began with (what else?) food.
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Finished it in a day!
- By Kathryn on 08-23-17
By: David Leite
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Battleborn
- By: Claire Vaye Watkins
- Narrated by: Ali Ahn, Morgan Hallett, Laura Knight Keating, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
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Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it.
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Wonderful magnificent stories beautifully told
- By Pedro Ramirez on 12-03-15
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Outside Looking In
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- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
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In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology PhD student, and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a freewheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living.
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STORYTELLING AS CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING
- By Christopher Meeks on 05-25-19
By: T. C. Boyle
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The Hour I First Believed
- A Novel
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 25 hrs and 9 mins
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When high-school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, while Caelum is away, Maureen finds herself in the library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed. Miraculously, she survives. But when Caelum and Maureen flee to an illusion of safety on the Quirk family's Connecticut farm, they discover that the effects of chaos are not easily put right.
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excellent all around yarn
- By G. on 01-10-09
By: Wally Lamb
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Strong Motion
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Scott Aiello
- Length: 20 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
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Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Wangs vs. the World
- By: Jade Chang
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Charles Wang is mad at America. A brash, lovable immigrant businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, he's just been ruined by the financial crisis. Now all Charles wants is to get his kids safely stowed away so that he can go to China and attempt to reclaim his family's ancestral lands - and his pride. Outrageously funny and full of charm, The Wangs vs. the World is an entirely fresh look at what it means to belong in America - and how going from glorious riches to (still name-brand) rags brings one family together in a way money never could.
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Spectacular
- By Barbara on 10-11-16
By: Jade Chang
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Tryin' To Sleep In the Bed You Made
- By: Virginia DeBerry, Donna Grant
- Narrated by: Fran L. Washington
- Length: 16 hrs and 24 mins
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Story
Gayle was the beauty who believed that a man could make her life complete. Patricia was the intellectual who thought that rising to the top of her career would make her happy. And then there is Marcus Carter, who has been linked to both Gayle and Pat since the tragedy that occurred when they were all children. Can either one save him from himself? Can friends survive a love that comes between them? Each of them gets what she wants, but no one counts on the price they have to pay.
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Better with each chapter!
- By Cyn B. on 02-09-16
By: Virginia DeBerry, and others
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Sobriety with a sense of style....
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Beautiful, haunting and unmistakably Mary!
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Kate, born to abusive, drug addicted parents, identifies an inner God voice when she is very young. This voice, and the support of her grandmother, helps her overcome her circumstances instead of falling victim to them. However, as she grows up she finds that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, and she discovers that she is an addict herself. Deciding not to go down the path her parents went, she rises above her circumstances again and chooses the path of recovery.
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Excellent Read
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Smashed
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From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, 24-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes "the usual". With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at 14, alcohol poisoning at 16, blacked-out sexual experience at 19, and total disorientation after waking up in an unfamiliar New York City apartment at 22.
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Smashed
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What listeners say about Lit
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Pixie0824
- 04-24-19
Dark and Real
Mary’s voice adds to the exhaustive reality of an all too common life. I resonate so much with her story of a life begun in the American south. Alcohol is insidious and almost impossible to avoid. It colors a life like bright red blood that dries into a dark red, ugly stain.
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- K. Russell
- 07-30-12
Strong Memoir & Fantastic Narration by Mary Karr!
If you could sum up Lit in three words, what would they be?
Compelling. Interesting. Honest.
What did you like best about this story?
I loved how this story didn't just discuss Karr's alcohol addiction, but also how she made her way as a writer and author during this time. You didn't just get "Lit" in regards to being drunk, but also in regards to "literary." I found that aspect of her early life as a writer even more interesting than her addiction.
What does Mary Karr bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Having Mary Karr read her own story really gave me a sense of place and person. Mary's voice, with its slight southern accent, really added to the nuances of the words and narration. I feel as if I got so much more out of this listening to her read her memoir to me than to read it myself. It was so compelling, I'd find myself doing chores around the house just so I could keep listening to it in on my iPod!
Any additional comments?
If you like a good story by someone who isn't afraid to share it all, to show herself in an unflattering light, and appreciate the writer's life, you'll love this.
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- Bearcat
- 12-05-19
Wow!
I enjoyed this book so much!!! I was not familiar with Ms. Karr prior to listening to this book and as a Syracuse native, I was to find out that she’s practically in my own back yard! I enjoyed her humorous approach, sarcastic candor and just overall real-ness. She tells her story in such a way that it makes you feel like you were there for each situation or encounter that she describes. It’s a long but fantastic listen!
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- Angela
- 11-18-19
moving
wonderfully narrated by the author. thoughtful and funny. one of my favorite reads so far.
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- David O. Cutright
- 04-28-12
I thought it was kinda whiny and fake.
Would you try another book from Mary Karr and/or Mary Karr?
No, I don't think I'll try another book by Mary Karr. I mistakenly thought this was the memoir of an average Jane who overcame struggles with alcoholism, but she is a professional memoirist and a college prof to boot. If you take away all the literary fluff the book would be about 6 or 7 hours long. I actually wish I could personally call her and ask for my money back and tell her I think she is a big fake. Due to the fact that she is a professional I kept wondering if she was just hyping up her alcoholism and after about 3 minutes of her admittance into the mental hospital she is complaining about being there like some angsty kid.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
Her narration was flat and unenethusastic, I thought it was whiny because she doesn't sound thankful at all for her success.
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- mickhez
- 01-16-23
Excellent
Mary Carr’s style of writing and storytelling grabs the readers instantly, taking us from tears to laughter to introspection, all in one short paragraph. Pure joy to have her narrate.
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- Michael J Murphy
- 11-09-23
Excellent
Loved this just as I loved her previous memoirs :) definitely recommend listening to or reading !
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Performance
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Story
- R Cravey
- 12-13-12
Entertaining and Engaging Story
What made the experience of listening to Lit the most enjoyable?
Hearing the book being read by the author added so much more to the enjoyment of learning this story. Mary Karr is very entertaining and I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Definitely! However, I did not have the opportunity. I listen to books most nights when doing chores, etc. I found myself anxiously awaiting the end of the day so I could begin listening to "Lit" again. Excellent story!
Any additional comments?
I enjoyed this book so much that I purchased the Kindle version as well. I have not read Mary Karr's first two books but definitely will in the future. She has some great interviews on YouTube. If you are the least bit undecided about purchasing this book, go to YouTube and read some of her introductions to the book. You will definitely be hooked.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- GothamReader
- 04-10-18
Nothing short of extraordinary
I listen to a lot of audiobooks and this one reaches the pantheon of the top 10. Mary Karr, though not always most animated, is inspired.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Juli M.
- 03-02-19
definitely worth a listen
narrator has a harsh halting voice. loved the pieces about learning to get off booze and help from AA and God. loved the honesty about drinking.
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