In “Lit,” her searing new memoir, Mary Karr recalls that she and her impossible mother used to play a game, when they were driving or her mother was bored or sprawled on her bed with a hangover: “Tell me a story she liked to say, meaning charm me — my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me
This game, aided and abetted by her father’s abundant storytelling gifts — his ability to regale his drinking buddies with all manner of startling tales — would fuel Ms. Karr’s own hunger for putting “marks on paper.” Even when she was a child, stapling together a book of rhymes she’d done in crayon, she knew that writing was a way she “could puncture the soap bubble” of her mother’s misery, that writing was a way to seize people’s attention and enthrall them. . . . . .
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