6 reviews for The Liars Club
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The Liars Club
by Mary Karr
Description:
When it was published in 1995, Mary Karr’s The Liars Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, as well as bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s a hard drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at twelve, and an oft married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. Now with a new introduction that discusses her memoir’s impact on her family, this unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as “funny, lively, and un-put-downable” (USA Today) today as it ever was.
About The Author
Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars’ Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
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 delves vividly and often humorously into 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, author Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart.
Skryf Review
“Excellent Reading”
Tisha
The first sentence in Stephen King’s “On Writing” praises Mary Karr’s “The Liars Club” as an example of excellent writing. So I thought: recommendation from a good source. It is a painful coming-of-age autobiographical narrative written from the adult author’s point of view. Impossible as it may seem, it is told with look-back wisdom, love, and hard humor. Karr is an excellent writer. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and wholeheartedly recommend it.
Krushali
The Liars’ Club is Mary Karr’s memoir of her childhood growing up in a small, east Texas oil town, and was first published in 1995. The thought of how this woman’s writing has managed to escape me until two weeks ago is unnerving. I blame all of you, actually, for not telling me about her sooner. Jesus and the angels will help me recover from this most bitter betrayal.From the first page of this book I was sucked in. I had to sleep with it next to my head on my pillow and carry it around with me at all times. When I finished it, I wanted to read again. Her writing is brutal, ballsy, alluring and sharp.Mary was the type of child who, at the age of nine, climbed up a tree and started shooting bbs at the family of a boy who insulted her. She would flip off her grade school teachers and tell other authority figures to, “Eat me raw,” thinking it was just another way of saying, “Kiss my ass.”Yeah, so when you see your neighbors’ children behaving like anarchist strippers on crack and you wonder if you should call child-protective services, you might want to read this book first, because its hilarious and tragic and the best damn thing I’ve read in a long time. And I’m not saying it should have any bearing on you making that call. That’s between you and God. What I’m saying is Brutally Sharp Alluring Balls, people, that’s all I’m sayin’.
Anmol
I like it for three main reasons. First, she’s excellent at describing the setting; the background of a hot, gritty, smelly East Texas town fills the story, as does their beach escapades and dalliance to Colorado. Second, part of the premise (indicated by the title) is that storytellers have a right if not obligation to make the story a bit bigger than reality would suggest – so the reader is never sure what is truth and what is bigger than truth. Most importantly, her own character is just incredible. Spunky and mean and tough, she goes through a lot of horrible things, sees and experiences things a child shouldn’t, but really fights back. Your heart breaks a few times but I think by the end of it you realize how powerful children can be.
parth
A woman covers up a secret younger life when she marries (or remarries) and has two children. Yet the trauma of that life follows her. The result is this memoir from one of her daughters whose Texas and Colorado childhood is laced with remnants of her mother’s former life and other self–because her mother seems to be two people. You know, the choices-of-the-mother-affects-the-daughter thing. This is a young girl’s story of living with parents who suffer from mental illness and alcoholism. I would add PTSD perhaps (her dad being a veteran who was also wounded twice). Melancholic and courageous story-telling told with retrospective ease. The type of “voice” that seeks no pity, rather choosing to educate through life experiences. Like this pivotal moment (I won’t spoil it by saying what happened before) when she stops caring about what people think: “For the first time, I felt the power my family’s strangeness gave us over the neighbors. Those other grown-ups were scared. Not only of my parents but of me. My wildness scared them. Plus they guessed that I’d moved through houses darker than theirs. All my life I’d wanted to belong in their families, to draw my lunch bag from the simple light and order of their defrosted refrigerators. The stories that got whispered behind our supermarket cart, or the silence that fell over the credit union when Daddy shoved open the glass door–these things always set my face burning. That afternoon, for the first time, I believed that Death itself lived in the neighboring houses. Death cheered for the Dallas Cowboys, and wrapped canned biscuit dough around Vienna sausages for the half-time snack.” The second part of the book is when the words really jumped off the page for me though. I’m now curious, and will be looking into “Cherry” and “Lit” from Mary Karr.
Shrawan
Re-read. I stand by the five star rating. Karr’s voice is pure, poetic and real. Though my childhood was nothing like hers, the bits which I identify with stir up an amazing welter of emotions and ghosts for me. I fall overboard into this memoir and can smell the East Texas refinery town just like I’d grown up there. Karr’s description of her mother’s Nervousness is priceless and heartwrenching. The whole book is beautifully written, so much so that one hardly realizes how deeply dysfunctional the family is until one surfaces, after, and looks around one’s own life.