Well.  I needed this book.  Or the tears streaming from my eyes said I did.

And before you say, “But Elissa, why?  You’re not an alcoholic, and you live a pretty good life,” I’m gonna hold my hand up right there, in front of your face, and retort, “But everyone’s got a hell in their life.  Usually it’s of their own making.  Usually it’s rectifiable, but it takes time to uncover a solution to it.  Usually in small moments, you think your life should be different, more grandiose (and I don’t mean money!), more crystal clear (ever wonder why the heading of this blog is Living the Questions?).

Mary Karr, writer of several poetry collections and bestselling memoirs, and a teacher of poetry and literature at Syracuse University, starts out her latest book, Lit: “Any way I tell this story is a lie…”

She understands that what she remembers might not be gospel truth.  She also understands that she can only take us so deeply into her self-absorbed pathway to destruction–there has to be some sort of redemption or change in there for it to mean anything.  At least that’s the way I see a good memoir.  What’s the point if nothing comes of your tragedy?  What’s the purpose in downloading your sorrows on us, if it doesn’t mean anything in the end?

Her years of alcoholic abuse, during her son Dev’s formative years, break your heart.  It’s like watching a car accident in slow motion.

And then.  She’s dragged (and I mean dragged and cajoled) into talking to a Higher Power, to gain the strength she needs to eschew the bottle (or rather, bottles).  She refuses to use the word God.  Seriously, isn’t He the problem?

I have to tell you.  Just her honesty alone makes me sit up and listen.  [Sort of like Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.]  It’s raw, gut-wrenching storytelling like this that makes me believe there’s a God somewhere.  All that pious, rote stuff you get at church can’t make me believe anything.  It’s the personal stories of people in the trenches that make me want to stand up and say howdy.

In the following examples, I’ve not forgotten quotation marks.  Karr doesn’t use them.

At one point, her therapist at the halfway house (Deb) says to another friend Janice, “Mary’s reluctant to get down on her knees because she doesn’t believe in God.

“I add, What kind of God wants me to get on my knees and supplicate myself like a coolie?

“Janice busts out with a cackling laugh, You don’t do it for God!  You do it for yourself.  All this is for you…the prayer, the meditation, even the service work.  I do it for myself, too.  I’m not that benevolent.

“How does getting on your knees do anything for you? I say.

“Janice says, It makes you the right size.  You do it to teach yourself something.  When my disease has ahold of me, it tells me my suffering is special or unique, but it’s the same as everybody’s.  I need to put my body in that place, because otherwise, my mind can’t grasp it.”

Karr’s in a dark place.  She can’t let go of her preconceived notions, her anger, her personal vendettas.  [Okay, a SEVERE WARNING for all you who don’t want to subject yourself to “bad language.”  I believe it has real power here, but if you’re not up for it, skip to the end of this post.]

Karr is taking Dev’s babysitter home, and they get stuck in traffic.

“See, I resent this shit, I say, pressing on the horn, adding, Even the fucking traffic feels orchestrated to fuck me up.  Dev needs to eat.  You need to get home before dinner curfew or you’re grounded.

“It’s funny, she says, how everybody else is traffic, huh?

“I laugh, saying, making amends to other people isn’t high on my list right now.  I’m still too pissed at everybody.

“Think of all the ways you’ve let yourself down, resentments against yourself, she says, and she looks at me from down her turned-up nose.

“I say, I’m too much of an asshole even to contemplate looking at that carnage.

“Listen to how you let your own mind talk to you, she says.  You’d fight anybody to the ground who said that shit to you.”

Am I the only person who can relate to that?  I mean, come on, talking badly about yourself (in your head, and sometimes out loud) is the norm, isn’t it?  I mean, we didn’t grow up saying positive and beautiful things about our bodies and personalities, did we?  We learned to cover them up, if we had any.  I remember Oprah telling a story once about her fifth-grade self, and how in class she had raised her hand to answer all the questions, and how she had quickly found out that that was NOT COOL.  She learned to fake stupidity and downplay her strengths, early on.  [Okay, I think I went one step further in, ahem, junior high…don’t twist my arm, okay, okay, high school…I would raise my hand as the bell was ringing, “So is there any homework for tomorrow?”  Slow learner, you might say.]

Here’s how I think you get to the truth of yourself.

Ready?

Ruthless honesty.  I mean the kind that will send you to bed in tears.  For days and days.  For however long it takes to get it all out.

Here’s the quote sent to Karr by Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life: A Memoir.  If you haven’t read it, you should.  [The same goes for Lit.]

“Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken of its cautionary fruit…Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed…Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else.  Take no care for your dignity.  Those were hard things for me to come by, and I offer them to you for what they may be worth.”

When this happens, you’re on the long road to recovery (or self-discovery)…or both.  Prayer…or quiet…helps.

At one point, surrounded by drinking prize-winning bigwig luminaries, Karr is desperate for a drink.  But she’s determined to do the right thing, so she hides away in a bathroom stall.

“Pray.  Get on your knees and get still.…

“I try to detach from the scattered thoughts that float up in me, and they start to drift away from the small damp spot I’m kneeling in.  Silently, I say one of the few prayers I know, the serenity prayer–maybe my second or third truly desperate prayer.

“I clasp my hands together before my chest, and where my head has been jabbering, I find unusual space.  Please keep me away from a drink.  I know I haven’t been really asking, but I really need it.  Please please please. Starting to get up, I kneel again.  And keep me from feeling like such an asshole.

“Those of you who’ve never prayed before will cackle like crows and scoff at the change I claim has overtaken me.  But the focus of my attention has been yanked from the pinballing in my head to south of my neck, where some solidity holds me together.  I feel like a calmer human than the one who’d knelt a few minutes before.  The primal chattering in my skull has dissipated as if some wizard conjured it away.

“I walk back to the table with a pearl balanced in my middle….”

She realizes that the bad things in her life, that she’s always blamed on someone else (perhaps God with a capital G) saved her.  “The boundaries of my skin grow thin as I kneel there squinting my eyes shut.  For a nanosecond, I am lucent.

“Inside it: an idea, the thread of a different perspective than any I’ve ever had.  It’s a thought so counterintuitive, so unlike how I think, it feels as if it originates from outside me.  The voice–the idea–comes in solid quiet in the midst of psychic chaos, and it says, If Dev hadn’t been sick so much, you’d have kept drinking….”

“It’s unhip to fall to your knees, sentimental, stupid, even.  But somehow I’ve started to do it unself-consciously.

“Behind a door, my body bends, and the linoleum rises.  I lay my face on my knees in a posture almost fetal.  It is, skeptics may say, the move of a slave or brainless herd animal.  But around me I feel gathering–let’s concede I imagine it–spirit.  Such vast quiet holds me, and the me I’ve been so lifelong worried about shoring up just dissolves like ash in water.  Just isn’t.  In its place is this clean air.

“There’s a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that’s a perfect zero you can go into.  There’s a rest point between the heart muscle’s close and open–an instant of keenest living when you’re momentarily dead.  You can rest there.”

I like that.  It’s a lot like the feeling you get when you start listing things you’re grateful for.  When you attend to those things, your colorful and abundant world slips back into focus, and the fuzzy haze of discouragement seems to slide away temporarily.

If only I could live in that colorful and abundant world of focus always.

I have to let go.  I have to release everything.

And that’s really dang hard for a recovering control freak.