MARY KARR (speaking to students): Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Mary Karr talks about her love of poetry with students at a writers’ conference in Michigan.

KARR (speaking to student): Hello, honey-bun.

VALENTE: Karr was known mainly as a poet until her coming-of-age memoir, “The Liars’ Club,” became a bestseller in the 1990s. It was the vivid story of a sometimes hilarious but often brutal Texas childhood. (speaking to Mary Karr): Here’s a snapshot of your past, the past that you write about: troubled family life, unstable childhood, alcoholism, divorce, depression, near suicide. Who is Mary Karr today?

KARR: Well, it’s really been uphill since all that.

VALENTE: Karr reveals the rest of her story in a new memoir, a story summed up in its title “Lit”—as in lit from within by the literature she grew up with, by alcohol and drugs, and finally lit by a faith she found unexpectedly in the Catholic Church.

KARR (speaking to writers’ conference): No one in the Catholic Church hired me as a spokesperson, nor would they. I’m sure I’m not the pope’s favorite Catholic, nor is he mine.

VALENTE: Karr grew up amid the hardscrabble oil fields of East Texas. Her father drank himself to death. Her mother was married seven times.

KARR: I’m somebody who really does feel like I was snatched out of the fire and found something in myself that’s luminous and gives me ballast.

VALENTE: The road to faith was a long, hard climb for someone who once described herself as an “undiluted agnostic.” By her mid-thirties Karr’s life had begun to unravel. Her marriage was failing. She drank heavily, wrecked the family car, was hospitalized for an emotional breakdown. In desperation, she took a friend’s advice and reluctantly began to pray.

KARR: I would kind of bounce on my knees, and I would say, “Higher power, please keep me sober today”—whatever they told me to say—and then at night I would say, “Thank you for keeping me sober today,” and then I started to express myself, which was often, you know, with obscene gestures, double-barrel at the light fixtures.

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