Her memoir The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It explores her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. She was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart. She followed the book with another memoir, Cherry, about her late adolescence and early womanhood. A third memoir, Lit: A Memoir, which she says details "my journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic," came out in November 2009. The memoir describes her time as an alcoholic and the salvation she found in her conversion to Catholicism. She describes herself as a cafeteria Catholic.
Karr won a 1989 Whiting Award for her poetry. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2005 and has won Pushcart prizes for both her poetry and her essays. Karr has published five volumes of poetry: Abacus, The Devil's Tour, Viper Rum, Sinners Welcome, and Tropic of Squalor. Her poems have appeared in major literary magazines such as Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. Karr's Pushcart Award-winning essay, "Against Decoration", was originally published in the quarterly review Parnassus and later reprinted in Viper Rum. In this essay, Karr took a stand in favor of content over poetic style. She argued emotions need to be directly expressed, and clarity should be a watch-word: characters are too obscure, the presented physical world is often "foggy", references are "showy", metaphors overshadow expected meaning, and techniques of language only "slow a reader's understanding". Another essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer", was originally published in Poetry. Karr tells of moving from agnostic alcoholic to baptized Catholic of the decidedly "cafeteria" kind, yet one who prays twice daily with loud fervor from her "foxhole". In this essay, Karr argues that poetry and prayer arise from the same sources within us.
Karr was born in Groves, Texas, on January 16, 1955, and lived there until she moved to Los Angeles in 1972. That same year, she started at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she studied for two years and met poet Etheridge Knight, one of her first mentors. She attended and graduated from Goddard College, where she studied with the poets Robert Hass and Stephen Dobyns. Karr was married to poet Michael Milburn for 13 years. At some point, she had a relationship with David Foster Wallace, and she has been described as an inspiration for a character in his novel, Infinite Jest. Although a convert to Catholicism, Karr supports views that are at odds with Catholic Church teaching: on abortion she is pro-choice, and she has spoken in favor of women's ordination to the priesthood. Karr has described herself as a feminist since age 12.
