Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Zac DavisApril 27, 2018
Photo credit: Antonio De Loera-Brust

“Any way I tell this story is a lie.” Mary Karr opens her memoir “Lit” with a warning about the inevitable unreliability of memory. But don’t be fooled. Mary Karr delivers many truths that you need to hear.

Mary Karr is an award-winning poet and New York Times best-selling author. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and the Paris Review. Her trilogy of memoirs, The Liars Club, Cherry and Lit, chronicle her traumatic childhood in southeast Texas, her turbulent coming of age as a woman and poet, her marriage and motherhood, alcoholism and recovery and conversion to the Catholic faith.

We were grateful to chat with Mary about all of this and more during our live event at America’s headquarters in New York City, sponsored by the Catholic Travel Centre.

Before we delve into the live recording, we’re reunited with Olga (who missed the live event, succumbing to a nasty fever) to discuss the week’s top Catholic news: A surprise parish visit from a Catholic NBA all-star; Pope Francis gives out free gelato on his name day to Rome’s needy and appoints three women to consult the Vatican’s oldest congregation; a nun is being deported for living out the Gospel in the Philippines; and we discuss an alarming trend of the killing of priests in Mexico.

As always, check us out on Twitter @jesuiticalshow, and send us some feedback (or just say hi! We love that too.) by emailing jesuitical@americamedia.org. You can support the show (and get exclusive swag and bonus content!) by joining our Patreon community.

Links from the show

Trust the prayers: Embiid surprises churchgoers near Philly
Pope Francis offers free gelato to Rome’s poor and homeless to mark his feast day
Be fruitful and multiply: Threatened trees planted in Vatican Gardens
Pope Francis appoints three women as consultants to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Philippines to deport 71-year old Australian nun who advocates for farmers
Lay down your weapons, say Mexican bishops after second priest murdered

What’s on tap?

Sugar Hill Golden Ale, courtesy of Harlem Brewing Company

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

Our country is not only in a constitutional crisis; we are in a biblical crisis.
Terence SweeneyMay 21, 2025
A Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, by Father Terrance Klein
Terrance KleinMay 21, 2025
Pope Leo XIV meets with Vice President JD Vance after the formal inauguration of his pontificate at the Vatican on May 18. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo I helped to ensure that Catholicism would outlast the Roman Empire. His name is a reminder that our faith rises above contemporary politics and temporal authority.
The Gospel parable of the “wasteful sower” who casts seeds on fertile soil as well as on a rocky path “is an image of the way God loves us,” Pope Leo XIV told 40,000 visitors and pilgrims at his first weekly general audience.
Cindy Wooden May 21, 2025