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Mary Karr, Christian writer? Fans of "The Liars' Club," her lyrically profane memoir of growing up in southeast Texas, may struggle with the concept.
But Karr's new book, "Sinners Welcome," features religiously explicit poems and concludes with an essay describing her midlife embrace of prayer and Catholicism.
Even before the book, some writer friends teased her. In the essay, she quotes a postcard from one: "Not you on the pope's team. Say it ain't so!"
In case anyone is worrying, "Sinners Welcome" (HarperCollins, $22.95) is typical of Karr's work in that it's searing, not sentimental. Even some of the religious poems would merit an R-rating.
Further proof that she hasn't lost her edge came in a recent phone interview. Describing a rough patch in her spiritual life, she said, "I gave God the finger a lot and called him an amateur more than once."
Karr won't tell her age, but based on references in her work it's about 50. She grew up near Port Arthur, Texas, the younger of two daughters.
Her father, an oil refinery worker, was a great storyteller, and her mother voraciously read the classics. But both drank too much, and her mother had a psychotic breakdown.
In her late teens, Karr left Texas, eventually becoming a widely published poet and teacher of creative writing at Syracuse University in New York. There, as a single mother in need of money for a car, she wrote a no-holds-barred account of her childhood, with much description of coastal Texas and its ways, and special attention to the benefits and hazards of life with her parents.
This was "The Liars' Club," which was what her father and his buddies called their regular, after-work gatherings for drinking and telling tales.
In a rave review, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times said Karr wielded language "with the virtuosity of both a lyric poet and an earthy, down-home Texan."
The critic also said, "What's remarkable about this book ... is the very fact that she doesn't turn her parents into two-dimensional stick figures but instead makes them wonderfully palpable human beings, flawed, unreliable, even treacherous but also vulnerable and desperate to love."
"The Liars' Club" came out in 1995 and stayed on best-seller lists for about a year. In paperback, it became a book club favorite. She followed in 2000 with Cherry, an equally frank account of her adolescence. It, too, was a best seller.
But even as she was writing about her decidedly secular youth, Karr was taking baby steps in a religious pilgrimage. It began in the early 1990s with prayer for help with staying sober.
"All my (writing) success came after prayer and quitting drinking," she said.
Karr had long been an agnostic, but was willing to try religion if it could help her fight alcoholism - something she had vowed to do for herself and her son. An ex-heroin-addict friend suggested she commit to a month of praying daily for help.
So she did, saying simply "Keep me sober" in the morning and "Thanks" at night.
Karr doesn't think it's coincidental that sobriety followed prayer. For one thing, she began to experience something new while praying.
"I got this weird sense of presence, south of my neck. This was clearly not me. It was very quiet, while I was noisy."
Karr went on to habitually recite a famous prayer of St. Francis ("Lord make me an instrument of thy peace ..."). Eventually her son Dev asked to go to church, and they began what Karr calls a "God-a-rama," visiting not only churches but also temples, mosques and Zen meditation centers.
In 1996, Karr was baptized a Catholic, though she acknowledges that many of its policies grate against her feminism. She was won over by the liturgy and other rituals of the church, by certain kindly and wise priests, and especially by the volunteer work.
"There's a great tradition in the church of the laity really being active with the poor," she said. "I found that in the Episcopal Church, maybe the checks they wrote were bigger, but in the church I went to, people went and worked in soup kitchens."
For 30 weeks, Karr was part of a group engaged in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The program involves lectures, one-on-one meetings with a spiritual director, daily prayer and the keeping of a prayer journal.
The experience, she said, left her with a "better sense of Christ." She also made progress toward the exercises' goal of having Christians love the world as God does.
"I don't think I love the world the way God loves it, but I love it a lot better than I did," Karr said.
The poems in Karr's new book directly address her faith. "Disgraceland" describes her conversion, and "Descending Theology: the Nativity" imagines Mary's giving birth to Jesus. "Meditatio" describes the "gentle pressure" applied by God in directing her life.
The title poem, "Sinners Welcome," is joyously erotic. But read in the context of the rest of the book, the joy seems possible only because of Karr's gathering faith.
Karr still teaches at Syracuse, but her main residence is in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. She's working on another volume of her memoirs, carrying her through her college years.
Faith came long after she left Texas, but the state remains an influence.
"The language of that place," Karr said, "is the first poetry I ever heard."
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(c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
