When a South Carolina author decided to write a memoir detailing his traumatic childhood, he found solace in the words and wisdom of Mary Karr.
Words by Clinton Colmenares | Illustration by Sam Watson
I was a skinny, wide-eyed 8-year-old when I first experienced the power of prayer. On a warm Sunday night in 1977, in the piney woods of east Texas, I knelt at an altar as a group of men I barely knew crowded so close that the church seemed to go dark. They reached out and laid hands on my shoulders and my head as a preacher prayed out loud for God to heal me.
They were praying for my mouth.
I had run through the yard of an old farmhouse my mother had just bought. A wire that was stretched tight between a fence post and a giant oak caught me between my teeth. It scraped down my gum as momentum flung my feet above my head. Gravity yanked me hard to the ground. I blacked out. When I came to, blood was running from my mouth, down my chin, and soaking my shirt. I screamed and ran to the house.
My mother put me in her truck and drove as fast as she could to the emergency room. A doctor said there was nothing he could do but take me to a dentist. Some days later, a dentist told my mother that my bottom front teeth were broken at the root and beyond saving. Take him home, he said, and pray.
My mother, early in her Christianity, called in evangelical reinforcements, including friends who were prayer warriors and the preacher at Bethlehem United Methodist Church, who organized the laying on of hands.
The week after that healing ritual, I sat in the same dentist’s chair, and he said my teeth looked normal. It was a miracle. Forty-five years later, my mother, now 93, still believes God reached down and reconnected my torn tissue, rearranged my gums, and made my teeth whole and healthy.
You would think I would have noticed the Hand of God in my mouth. I did not. I wasn’t old enough to understand how severe my injury was, but I had reason to doubt that Jesus juju crawled from those men’s souls, down their arms, and into my teeth.
I had prayed before without results. At 3 or 4, I got on my knees beside my bed and prayed that my mother would find a husband so she would be happy. I prayed that my dog that ran away would come back. I prayed that my step-grandfather would be cured of heart disease and diabetes.
No wonder religion and prayer faded into the background as I grew older. It hadn’t made a bit of difference. The dentist was wrong, or my mother misheard him. There was no Jesus juju. I stopped praying.
I moved away from east Texas and became a reporter, writing about medicine and science. Later, I worked for universities and medical centers. I chased my curiosity through shiny corridors and brightly lit labs filled with intellectuals. I didn’t need religion.
Then events challenged my nonbelief. In 2018, living alone in a rented townhouse in South Carolina, I was 50 and divorced (again), with a young teenage daughter whom I saw two, maybe three days a week. Long removed from the chaotic east Texas childhood, I hoped to examine it anew. I wanted to pull a memoir from the messy life I’d survived. Maybe I was trying to make sense of my past to understand how the hell I wound up in my present, hoping to ward off a lonely future.
In late 2021, I started writing about the chronic infidelity that had led to my parents’ divorce and my mother’s suicide attempts. I interviewed the older sister I hardly knew because at 14 she ran away and lived on the streets to escape sexual abuse at home. For most of my boyhood, my mother struggled in a state of deep depression, working jobs that barely paid minimum wage. My mother neglected me, my siblings, our house. Most of all, she neglected herself. Our world was gray. Any hint of color and light, say around a birthday or holiday, was quickly dimmed, the blinds yanked shut before any warmth and cleansing could take hold.
I wrote scenes about the night my mother confronted our father at his mistress’s apartment, with me and my brother in tow. I wrote about the night I ran to the neighbors’ house to ask them to call the cops on my sister, who had become a volatile, sometimes violent juvenile delinquent often on drugs. I also read memoirs to see how other writers dealt with their dark pasts. David Carr’s The Night of the Gun, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive were road maps around complicated emotions, and complex family and legal issues.
Exploring the depression became depressing. It was as if I was writing about the dirty work of being a coal miner, so I went down, down, down, into the mine shaft, where it got darker and darker and darker. I didn’t recognize the chemical changes in the air. I failed to notice the canary had gone silent. Between reliving a toxic past, exploring other people’s toxic pasts, trying to stay afloat in the second year of the pandemic, being outraged as Black people were killed by police, and watching a couple of personal relationships spin out of my control, I fell into a shitstorm of depression and anxiety.
At 3 in the morning one Monday in October 2021, I stood in my bathroom, sobbing uncontrollably. The dark, colorless world had enveloped me. I didn’t see a way out. I didn’t see any point in going on. I called my friend Betsy to tell her goodbye. She rushed over, and before lunch, I was in a mental health facility and roommates with a guy named Norman who was detoxing from alcohol and shaking so badly his pants wouldn’t stay up.
There’s a lot of downtime in a mental hospital. Besides meals and two or three group sessions where therapists tell patients how to not end up back here, people lie around in their rooms, work on jigsaw puzzles, or watch game shows.
Betsy brought me a stack of books, and over five days I read four of them, including Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club. I had read it 20 years before but had forgotten much of it, and I certainly hadn’t studied it to inform my own writing. I remembered that Karr’s family was poor, like mine; they were also quick-tempered, unpredictable, and prone to violent arguments. We both grew up in Texas, less than 100 miles apart, and Karr’s sensibilities fit me. The way she writes about the oppressive heat and humidity, running behind trucks spraying DDT for mosquitoes, the ditch in her front yard, the way she called her parents Mother and Daddy. It’s all familiar. She elevates Texas vernacular to art. And she’s damned funny.
As dark and desperate as Karr’s childhood got, she wrote with sunshine and hope, something I desperately needed and wanted. How did Karr get to a place, mentally and emotionally, where she could write about painful times so vividly and come out the other side in one piece? I emailed Karr’s press agent at HarperCollins and requested an interview. I got a reply right away. “I’m so sorry, but Mary isn't doing any interviews because she’s swamped writing and teaching,” the agent said. She suggested I listen to an interview Karr did with Terry Gross for NPR’s “Fresh Air,” and another one with Tim Ferriss, an entrepreneur, self-help author, and podcaster who has talked about the sexual abuse he endured as a child.
I found the “Fresh Air” and Ferriss interviews, and more. Karr has done the rounds, talking about her struggle with mental illness and how she crawled out from under it to write The Liars’ Club and her subsequent memoirs, Cherry and Lit. She’s been on “Fresh Air” at least three times, talking about her sobriety, her memoirs, and her abusive relationship with David Foster Wallace. She was also a guest on “On Being” with Krista Tippett, “Ten Percent Happier” with Dan Harris, “Next Question” with Katie Couric, “Beautiful Writers Podcast,” and a program called “Jesuitical” from America: The Jesuit Review, which sounds Seussian and features a couple of young, fun Catholics.
I listened to all of them at least twice, some four or five times. Each morning on my way to work, I would strap in, pull up an episode, and listen to Karr’s subtle Texas twang ride shotgun as we drove east across South Carolina’s Upstate. In the afternoon, I’d thumb over to another podcast, and Mary and I would chase the sun on our way home.
In The Liars’ Club, we learn that Karr’s mother is locked up after a nightmarish alcohol-fueled psychotic breakdown; she believes that she’s killed Mary and her sister with a butcher knife. In the podcasts, we learn that Mary, in her 30s, became what she feared most: an alcoholic like her mother. She tells us she checked into a “mental Marriott” for a few weeks because she was thinking of killing herself.
While she was there, someone suggested that she pray every day for 30 days. Karr grew up an atheist, her home devoid of anything godly. Her father thought religion took advantage of poor people. Her mother drifted among ideologies like a mosquito in a hurricane. Alcohol, passion, and rage were the holy trinity in the Karr household. It’s no wonder that at least one of those spirits, alcohol, was ruining her life. But, she says, “When you land in a mental institution, you have to say to yourself, ‘The ways I’m moving through this world aren’t succeeding.’”
She started getting on her knees every morning and every night, flipping the bird at the ceiling and praying to a god she didn’t believe in to help her stop drinking. Eventually, she felt better, so she kept praying. When her son wanted to go to church “to see if God was there,” Karr began taking him around to various houses of worship, a process she called “God-o-rama.” Eventually, Karr converted to Catholicism in 1996. She started saying a centering prayer every morning, and reading Scripture and meditating on it. At night, she “savors the moments where God was present” during the day.
She looks at her religious practice pragmatically. She doesn’t get caught up in doctrine and doesn’t worry about the details of an afterlife. “I’m just not in charge of that,” she told Krista Tippett, host of “On Being.” “I’m having a hard enough time just getting through the day. So for me, it’s all about practice and practicality and trying to be awake. And that means getting under that fear and anxiety.
“For me, being Catholic or having a meditative or spiritual practice is all about just trying to be guided by something bigger than the part of me that wants to French kiss my FedEx guy, you know? It just does. I need help. I need help, Krista.”
One day, in therapy, I heard the Voice of Karr. The therapist asked me why I keep choosing to relive the hurt and pain of the past. It dawned on me that the ways I was moving in the world weren’t working. It was like a reverse panic attack: I got calm, my breathing slowed, and the room came into focus.
Every night for the next eight weeks, I brushed my teeth, took my meds, and climbed into bed. My dog Jake jumped up and circled his way into a cozy spot beside me. I lay in the darkness and thought back on the good things that happened during the day and felt grateful for them. In the morning, before I took Jake out for a walk, I knelt beside my bed, propped myself on my elbows, and talked to a god I wasn’t sure I believed in. I thought of this figure as a Massive Energy Force. “Dear Massive Energy Force. Please help me not have a panic attack today. Help me not freak out. Keep me out of the darkness.”
I imagined Massive Energy Force looking down at me from a corner of my ceiling with a concerned and sometimes bemused expression. I didn’t expect much more. In her poem “The Voice of God,” Karr writes that God says most of what’s wrong with us could be cured by a hot bath.
The voice of God does not pander,
offers no five year plan, no long-term
solution, nary an edict. It is small & fond & local.
Don’t look for your initials in the geese
honking overhead or to see thru the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious crap —
put down that gun, you need a sandwich.
Karr was the only being suggesting I have a sandwich. I never heard Massive Energy Force or God. Never had a sign that my prayers were being heard. After eight weeks of praying every morning and every night, I ultimately felt worse. It got dark again. I did freak out, and I did have a panic attack. I stopped praying. I called my doctor, who tweaked my meds, and I felt better.
I still want to write about the dark and secretive things that happened in my family. I think writing about them will help me understand myself. But I know I’m not ready to do that yet. In The Art of Memoir, Karr writes “... everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little.” I don’t yet know how to write about my family without the pounding emotional surf pulling me under.
When students tell Karr they want to write about a traumatic event in their lives, she tells them to get some therapy first. She was 40 when The Liars’ Club was published. She had started therapy when she was 19 and she had been sober for at least five years. She’d put in the work.
The stuff I want to write about happened 40, 50 years ago, even before I was born. I’ve been in therapy for 20 years. I’ve put in a hell of a lot of work, too.
Karr told Gross in 2015, “I’m somebody who has a big inner life. And for most of my life, it had a lot of darkness in it. And, for me, prayer is a way of standing in a light.”
In her interview with Tippett, she also talked about prayer. “My head is a lot quieter after all of this — the 30 years of prayer and sobriety, the 20 years of being Catholic. I marvel and wonder a lot. I think I spend a lot of time astonished by the human comedy.”
All anyone with depression and anxiety wants is for the depression and anxiety to go the fuck away. We want light and quiet and the luxury of being able to marvel and wonder without being overwhelmed by brain demons.
In a February 2021 Facebook Live video, Karr, from her Upper East Side apartment, interviews her priest pal James Martin about his book Learning to Pray. Karr asks a question from a viewer: “Can God or a higher power be loaned or borrowed?”
Karr said she didn’t believe in God when she started praying, but she revered other people’s faith, and that drew her in. Martin says that was God working through her, so, sure, God can be borrowed.
Maybe I was borrowing Karr’s God and the lease expired. Maybe I was hanging onto her spiritual coattails.
I was looking for something to protect me from anxiety and depression, something that transcends therapy and medication. I found wisdom and comfort and perspective in the stories of a famous memoirist and poet. Maybe I should pray to Karr.
I still don’t know what my eight-week prayer experiment meant. I haven’t completely abandoned the idea of praying to a higher power. Maybe I just need to find the right one. Maybe I need to learn how to do it better. Maybe I need to believe that my teeth were beyond saving, and the intercessory hands of the men in that little church cured me. If only it were that easy.
Clinton Colmenares is a writer in Greenville, South Carolina. He is a student in the MFA program in narrative nonfiction at the University of Georgia.
Sam Watson is an Athens-born artist and graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University with a BFA in Communication Arts. She is passionate about editorial illustration, with a goal to engage viewers as well as create a safe and inclusive visual environment for them to learn and discover. Sam explores the line between organic and geometric shapes, and her simple descriptions provide fun and interesting imagery for all ages.
