Karr writes a stark, honest memoir about her time as an alcoholic and the process of her recovery (kicking and screaming). Her dark side so dark it threatened to extinguish her, the double meaning of the word "lit" is both her years of heavy drinking and the experience of coming out of that time period. She writes like a pulsing vein. Which makes her story that much more profound.
"Eventually I get drunk at her again, driving to the liquor store for a bottle of Jack Daniels like my poor Daddy used to drink (no scrap of awareness of the similarity), and I drink it in the garage while flipping through my wedding pictures, where Mother looks walleyed and very pleased with herself. I could drag her behind my car, I think. Instead, I drain the poison that I hope will kill her." Pg 130
"My body's a sandbag, but my eyelids split open like clam shells (3:10 AM). On the table, a tumbler of mahogany whiskey burns bright as any flaming oil slick. Gone a little watery on top, its still possessed of a golden nimbus.
That's the secret to getting up: the glass talks and my neck cranes toward the drink like flower to sunbeam. My heavy skull rises, throbbing with a pulse beat. I grab the drink and let a long gulp burn a corridor through the sludge that runs up the middle of me - that trace of fire my sole brightness. A drink once brought ease, a bronze warmth spreading through all my muddy regions. Now it only brings a brief respite from the bone ache of craving it, no more delicious numbness.
Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest and congregation. I rise on rickety legs, dripping sweat despite the air conditioner's blast across my naked chest. Foregoing bathrobe, I pull on a wife beater T-shirt (3:15!).
In the next room, my son, stout but saggy-kneed, clings to the crib bars like a prisoner. Menthol steam from the vaporizer has made a ghost of him. His ringlets are plastered to his head, and coughs rack his small frame. The animal suffering that's rattling him throws ice water on me, and I enjoy a surge of unalloyed love for him, followed by panic, followed by guilt.
He sees me rushing toward him and abruptly drops his outstretched arms an instant to say, No pants? His head's tilted with bald curiosity.
Which cracks me up, and he laughs till the coughs start exploding through him again, by which point I've cleaved him to me, both of us sweating. His diaper's sagging from the vaporizer's work, but fresh steam in his lifeline. Carrying him to the bathroom, I crank on the shower.
But before I change him, before I squirt the syrupy acetaminophen into his mouth, I haul him whooping down the stairs to the kitchen. I open the stove where a near bottle of Jack Daniels squats like the proverbial troll under the bridge. Needing neither glass nor ice, I press my lips to the cool mouth, and it blows into my lungs so I can keep on." Pgs. 159-160
"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. It 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 perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the hear muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there." Pg 296
Book 35
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