The Liars' Club: A Memoir [Paperback]

Mary Karr (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 1, 1996

A trenchant memoir of a troubled American childhood from the child's point of view describes growing up in an East Texas refinery town, life in the midst of turbulent family of drunks and liars, a schoolyard rape, and other dark secrets. Reprint. 75,000 first printing. NYT.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this funny, razor-edged memoir, Mary Karr, a prize-winning poet and critic, looks back at her upbringing in a swampy East Texas refinery town with a volatile, defiantly loving family. She recalls her painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip into psychosis; a fist-swinging father who spun tales with his cronies--dubbed the Liars' Club; and a neighborhood rape when she was eight. An inheritance was squandered, endless bottles emptied, and guns leveled at the deserving and undeserving. With a raw authenticity stripped of self-pity and a poet's eye for the lyrical detail, Karr shows us a "terrific family of liars and drunks ... redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth."

From Publishers Weekly

Poet Karr's NBCC nominated memoir of her East Texas childhood is a blackly comic tale of a family prone to alcoholism, violence and insanity.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books; 1 edition (March 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140179836
• ISBN-13: 978-0140179835
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (210 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #904,278 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mary Karr's first memoir, The Liar's Club, kick-started a memoir revolution and won nonfiction prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, it rode high on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, becoming an annual "best book" there and for The New Yorker, People, and Time. Recently Entertainment Weekly rated it number four in the top one hundred books of the past twenty-five years. Her second memoir, Cherry, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, also hit bestseller and "notable book" lists at the New York Times and dozens of other papers nationwide. Her most recent book in this autobiographical series, Lit: A Memoir, is the story of her alcoholism, recovery, and conversion to Catholicism. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays. Other grants include the Whiting Award and Radcliffe's Bunting Fellowship. She is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

161 of 170 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Memoir You Will Ever Read January 23, 2004

By Bill Slocum VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Mary Karr had to go through hell so you could read a very cool book. That's one way to look at this opus, an exploration of the author's East Texas girlhood and the collapsing family situation she found herself confronted with.

The book starts with a mystery: Why are police being called to the scene of a young girl's bed? Why is a kindly doctor inspecting her body for "marks?" The books builds a mystery, then takes more than 150 pages bothering to solve it, but by that time you are hooked too deep into the rest of the story to care. You want to find out how the most screwed up family ever to reside in the Lone Star State managed to survive themselves, albeit barely.

While the author is a recognized poet and esteemed college professor, and "The Liars' Club" is widely praised among literary critics, those fearing some pointy-headed exercise in literati snobbery at the expense of slack-jawed Western yokels need not fear. Not that Karr doesn't get in some digs at the rustic Bible-thumpers responsible for so much of her upbringing, but her style of writing is much more akin to Stephen King than Margaret Mead, writing in a real-world way about actual experiences she underwent in a way that will make you feel you underwent them to, whatever your age, sex, or social background. She describes everything from hurricanes to rapes to a child's first gulp of sparkling alcohol with a "you-are-there" veracity that is almost frightening, and hard to pull away from. Only James Ellroy's "My Dark Places" and Mikal Gilmore's "Shot Through The Heart" hold a candle to this in my experience, and I've read a few.

The cruelest thing one has to report about this book is, however savage the author's experience, it never stops being so goddam funny.... With an eye for detail like Dickens crossed with a sense of humor as constant as Twain's, Karr makes "The Liar's Club" the kind of book one can't just put down at the end of a chapter, however sleepy or battered by second-hand reality the reader might feel.

On telling about her grandmother's slow death from cancer, Karr is nothing if not succinct. "First they took off her toenail, then her toe, then her foot. Then they shot mustard gas through her leg till it was burnt black, then she screamed for six weeks nonstop. Then they took off her leg, and it was like a black stump laid on the pillow..."

So much for pathos, as she continues: "At the end of this report, [Karr's sister] Lecia and I would start scanning around whoever's kitchen it was for cookies or Kool-Aid. We knew with certain instinct that reporting on a dead grandma deserved some payoff."

She explains later that she wasn't so sorry to lose Grannie. The woman used a quirt on her hide and distended her mother's psyche to the point of breakdown. Though it's hard to say exactly. Karr doesn't give away much, but she offers this counterbalance to her tale of Grandma's ordeal: "Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name."

Anyone who's lost someone to cancer knows intimately what that means, and that's the heartbreak and the greatness of "The Liars' Club," a book that seems so amazingly knowing as it recounts Karr's firsthand experiences as a young girl. Her experiences are raw and miserable, to put it mildly, but she presents it in such a way to make it utterly compelling to the reader, yet endurable, too.

The book works on so many levels. I was left wondering about sister Lucia, a rock-steady character who often protects her younger sister, but whom Karr nevertheless savages throughout her narrative. Is she writing here as an adult, or channeling her younger self and some form of sibling rivalry? I also wondered about the title organization, a group of men with whom her father hangs out and tells tall tales. Whenever she describes a meeting, she slips from the past into the present tense for one of the few moments in the book. Is that a signal that the Liars' Club interludes are themselves tall tales by author Karr? Or is she telescoping her experience in those close quarters to give it the special verisimilitude that makes her relationship with her father so central to the story?

In one of these interludes, Karr ponders the nature of lying and how they reveal deeper secrets of the liar, that is to say, "how lies can tell you the truth." Certainly there's no earthly way of explaining her mother, an earthy Bohemian who takes to painting and drinking with equal fervor, feuding with her husband and taking advantage of a sudden inheritance Gloria Swanson-style. Any divorced father will find himself welling up with tears as he reads Karr's account of how he was separated and then reunited with his daughters.

There's nothing easy in this book, but so much to love. Everything good you've heard about this book is true. Now just go read it. Read more ›

91 of 99 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great, even if you don't like memoirs December 16, 1999

By Winter Wright

Format:Paperback

A friend gave me this book, saying she had liked it but wasn't crazy about confessional memoirs.

The Liar's Club may fit that description, but don't be put off, because it's absolutely fantastic. Mary Karr's writing routinely verges on prose-poetry and is, despite its dark subject matter, funny enough to make you laugh out loud. Then, once you're laughing, she turns around and hits you with something so brutal that you're caught up short.

I did find myself wondering, as I'm sure others have, whether some embroidery may have been involved in the author's crystal-clear recollections of events long past. She appears to have kept copious journals, but still, you wonder how anyone could have gotten so much detail down with such precision, especially as a child.

Then again, maybe she's a hyper-sensitive person with a photographic memory. Ultimately I didn't care if parts of it were embellished a bit. She's such a good writer that if this depiction of events captures the truth of her childhood, more power to her. My main reaction was a weirdly worshipful desire to locate Ms. Karr and make her tell me more stories, the ones that didn't make it into this book. (Actually, I'd be surprised if this has not happened to her.)

This book pulls you in. It's funny, poignant, shocking, memorable. I give it five richly deserved stars.

49 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Exposing the lies" December 13, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

"The Liars Club" is one of the most touching and simultaneously disturbing books I've read in quite awhile. In an unforgettable series of memoirs, Mary Karr has succeeded in retelling the astonishing events of her past in an earnest, heartfelt manner. Through her thorough recount, she is able to deliver a compassionate, and at times alarming, description of what it's like to love and be loved, to lie and be lied to. Mary Karr's voice shines as she describes her childhood from the witty, honest view of a young girl. Virtually all of her enthralling recollections are immersed in a unique humor that makes this book hilarious in a backwards way: "Your mother's threat of homicide--however unlikely she tries to make it sound--will flat dampen down your spirits." By using the fiery, blunt style Mary Karr has chosen as her own, she is able to throw the reader into her memories with great intensity: "Mother is reaching over for the steering wheel, locking onto it with her knuckles tight. The car jumps to the side and skips up onto the sidewalk. She's trying to take us over the edge." It's these two driving forces, humor and sharp honesty, that keep the reader from putting this book down. "The Liars' Club" is a poignant story of an ordinary child living in an extraordinary world. Mary Karr's witty commentary and intimate analysis of such a remarkable life make this book a very worthwhile read. Her compelling story should be considered as reading material for anyone striving to understand the value of his or her childhood.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Strength out of misery November 15, 2000

By Krista

Format:Paperback

Mary Karr grew up in an ugly place, the refinery/swamp town of Port Arthur, Texas, and in an ugly situation, with a mentally unstable mother and a hot tempered, hard drinking father. Yet out of such ugliness, she extracted great beauty in order to write this dazzling memoir. Despite Karr's dysfunctional childhood, her writing is completely devoid of woe-is-me whining or psychobabble.

Karr has a gift for spinning a tale, perhaps inherited from her father or honed at gatherings of his friends in "The Liar's Club," a group that met to drink, play cards, and swap stories. And boy, the stories she tells! There's the stories about her mother's manic/pyschotic episodes, including one time when she set her children's belongings on fire, another time when she attempted to drive the family off a bridge, and a third time when she threatened her lazy husband with a gun. Karr also tells about her inconsistent relationship with her father, who suffered a difficult life but emerged, if not unscathed, then unbroken.

Most remarkable about the book, though, are not the amazing stories but the matter of fact, even at times hilarious tone in which they are told. The woman telling these stories is no victim; she is a survivor. A miserable childhood did not cause Mary Karr to surrender her spirit, but rather forged her in fire and made her stronger.