I had never experienced anything like it before. I practiced deep breath exercises and did yoga, but breathing continued to feel unnatural, like attempting to walk again after a long convalescence. The physical act of lying back on a pillow seemed too vulnerable a position to take when there was so much left undecided, unplanned. With no immediate or long-term plans for the future, I frequently found myself unable to breathe, especially before bed. The anxiety attacks started in the summer of 2013, following my graduation from a master’s program in Montreal. I read on: how could a woman I admired so ardently-a woman who was smart, funny, successful, and who had once dated David Foster Wallace-submit to the same set of beliefs I had spent the whole of my adult life arguing against? What was the draw? What were the stakes? Only a week later, I found myself lying in bed whispering Hail Marys to fall asleep, Karr’s words ringing in my head: “Just try it…See if your life gets better…tell me I’m an asshole.” But instead of feeling betrayed by this turn of events, I was intrigued. “If it doesn’t, tell me I’m an asshole.”Ī few years ago, I might have stopped reading at the part where Karr first gets down on her knees, “becoming the right size” to surrender to a higher power. “Call it self-hypnosis, prayer, whatever. And then, some time after that, she’s the famous author of her first memoir, The Liar’s Club. Surrender, Mary.” Only a week after Karr starts praying, she receives a $35,000 grant to write a book. She thinks of The Wizard of Oz, a classic story about faith: “ Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry,” says one of her AA companions. While many find the use of faith-based principles in AA questionable, there’s no doubt that it worked for her. In Lit, Karr’s conversion is fuelled by a desire to get sober. Or, as Mary Karr herself put it in an interview with The Paris Review, being “lit by baby Jesus.” “You’ll love it.” Skipping the preface, I was halfway through the book before I discovered that the title contained a third layer of meaning-conversion. “I heard it’s about being an English student and drinking a lot,” he said. My boyfriend discovered Mary Karr’s 2009 memoir, Lit, in a used bookstore in Seattle. Which is why I was surprised when, recently, I found myself acting like a religious person.
And I am even more excited to exist as a non-religious writer, free of the idea that my words might “save” someone. At 26, I am no longer an adamant atheist, but I’m still excited to exist in the secular world as a non-religious person. It was simply the first time I had been encouraged to think about the world from a different perspective in all of my 18 years on the planet, and it opened the flood gates for a whole lot of anger, emotional poetry, and even (eventually) independent thought. I don’t think it’s too dramatic to say that within an hour of my first undergraduate philosophy class, I was no longer Catholic-not that I had a major epiphany or anything. In some ways, the church was my destiny-a fate that I existed in so comfortably, no one suspected I would reject it as soon as that opportunity arose, including myself. Sunday school turned into chastity workshops turned into youth camps, pro-life rallies, and theology classes. My father was a deacon who stood in for the priest on sick days. As a kid, I used to pretend to give homilies in the basement chapel of the nun’s house after school. I was raised in a Catholic household that grew exponentially more devout and more ideologically extreme with each passing year. My grandfather carved the pews in the church before I was born. “I want to surrender but have no idea what that means.”