With Lit, Mary Karr winds up a trilogy of memoirs that includes The Liar’s Club and Cherry. In her latest literary confession, which covers her booze-soaked early adulthood and the sobriety that follows, the author continues to delight with dark humour and pitch-perfect metaphors. Here, she guides us through her college years as an insecure, budding poet, and then into her doomed-from-the-start marriage to a writer. Shortly after they have a son together, Karr descends into alcoholism, and the family begins its slow but certain splintering. Meanwhile, Karr’s eccentric, recovering-alcoholic mother darts in and out of the picture, eliciting exasperation and heart-wrenching empathy in equal measure – a testament to the author’s staggering ability to write about her family with range and honesty.

Karr’s prose moves at a quick and seductive clip, delivering large doses of wit and painful insights about addiction. Sure, there are plenty of memoirs about being drunk, but this one has Karr’s voice – both sure-footed and breezy – behind it. Even after she sobers up, she continues to be an uninhibited force: when short-term boyfriend David Foster Wallace breaks her coffee table during an argument, she sends him a bill. Of course, as in most recovery stories, Karr delves into the more banal getting-sober stuff. The author is clearly self-conscious about her embrace of religion, but she couldn’t quite keep that part of the tale – approximately the last third of the book – from becoming a bit dowdy and plodding. Still, even when Karr is writing about church, Lit has enough flashes of brilliance to keep you under its intoxicating spell.

Beth Greenfield