It’s the birthday of poet, essayist, and memoirist Mary Karr (b. 1955), probably most famous for her three bestselling memoirs, The Liars’ Club (1995), Cherry (2001), and Lit (2009).

Karr was born in Groves, Texas, and there she had a hair-raising childhood marked by neglect, alcoholic parents, and a mentally unstable mother who once tried to kill Karr with a butcher knife. And other traumatic stuff. (Read about it in The Liars’ Club.) After a stormy adolescence (read about it in Cherry), Karr studied at Macalester College and graduated with an MFA from Goddard College in 1979. In 1983 she married poet Michael Milburn and in 1986 gave birth to their son, Dev, but the marriage was disastrous and Karr by then was struggling with alcoholism herself; she recounts this struggle, her road to recovery, and her surprising conversion to Catholicism in Lit. (As I recall, her first prayers to God were pretty hair-raising by any standard.)

In 1987, Karr published her first book of poetry, Abacus, and in 1989 won a Whiting Award (for emerging writers). More poetry collections have followed, the latest of which is Tropic of Squalor (2018). Karr is a professor of literature at Syracuse University, and every few years while conducting a graduate lit class, she will stage a fight with a colleague unbeknownst to the students in class and then ask them to write about it. The experience is usually a humbling one as the students learn just how much their own baggage and biases influence their perceptions.

Fun fact: Karr was the inspiration for the character Joelle Van Dyne (a.k.a. Madame Psychosis) in Infinite Jest, the novel by David Foster Wallace, with whom she had a relationship in the 1990s.

As a poet, Karr is known for being “unsentimental” and “unsparing,” and she once wrote a famous/infamous essay called “Against Decoration” in which she argued for clarity in poetry and against showy techniques, directly criticizing some Very Big Names.

Karr’s poem “The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God on the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives” begins:

Today I heard a rich and hungry boy verbatim quote

all last night’s infomercials—an anorectic son

who bought with Daddy’s Amex black card

the Bowflex machine and Abdomenizer,

plus a steak knife that doth slice

the inner skin of his starving arms.

Poor broken child of Eve myself,

to me, the flightless fly…

(Read the whole thing here.)

Have a Wednesday full of surprising redemptions and stay scrupulously honest to the data.