stephen king raves about this book in his book about writing, on writing. i loved on writing & think stephen king is an awesomely underrated craftsperson when it comes to writing, so i eventually got my act together & checked this book out of the library. kind of astonishing that it took me like six years to do it! i read the whole thing in two days. it really is amazing! it's a memoir of mary karr's early years, growing up with a mental unstable mother & an oil worker father who attempts to keep home life running peacefully for mary & her older sister, lecia. the book seems to center on a few years, betweeh the ages of five & nine or so, while mary's maternal grandmother moved in to wait to die of cancer, a neighbor boy molested mary, mary's mother lost her mind & had herself committed to a mental institution, the family uprooted from west texas & re-located to coloarado, mary's parents divorced, a man hired to babysit mary molested her, mary's mother re-married a local barfly & proceeded to menace him with a gun, lecia convinced the girls' father to bring them back to texas, & mary's mother returns to texas, divorces her barfly husband, & re-marries the girls' father. the titular liars' club refers to the gathering of men that mary's father hung around with at the VA hall, playing cards & drinking whiskey. they amused one another with long-winded reminisces of their youths, which were often complicated lies. mary's father was especially good at keeping the other men enthralled to his untruths. but the title also refers to the way memory makes liars of us all, with its convenient collusions that help us survive trauma & grow up, even when the deck is stacked against us. the last few chapters recount mary's father's slow death following a stroke, & mary's reconnections with her mom, questioning her about her secretive & dramatic past, filled with ex-husbands & secret children. i can't believe that somehow no one else ever recommended this book to me! it was right up my alley. i did think it was weird that all the reviews went on & on about how how horiffic mary's childhood was, how unsettled & traumatic. i didn't get that mary karr was trying to write a book about her unsettled, traumatic, horrifying childhood, so much as she was acknowledging that she'd crossed paths with some characters in her day, & that they might make a good book. the sexual abuse is portrayed more as incidental than part of a narrative structure, although she points out that sexual abuse is a common narrative path winding through the lives of children growing up girl. certainly mary & her sister survived some traumatic incidents, & mary writes about dissociation & learning to block memories out. but she also makes the point that all these cookie cutter happy-seeming families that she hoped would adopt her as a child come with their own baggage & their own traumas, & that her book wound up speaking to a more universal truth than she ever intended (i read the tenth anniversary re-issue, which comes with an introduction from the author on how the book has been received over the years). this book, especially all the well-written descriptions of oil tanks & her dad coming home smelling like crude oil, brought up a lot of memories i thought i'd forgotten about my own family (my dad worked at an oil refinery). & it made me think a lot about the way people recoil from some of my family stories, & how, i guess, every unhappy family is unhappy in similar ways.
I had heard a great deal about Mary Karr's _The Liars' Club_ before I read it. _The Liars' Club_ is considered one of the groundbreaking books in the current memoir movement, and there is much for a writer to learn from it, both things to steal and things to avoid.To steal, of course, are the humor and honesty. One of my favorite moments occurs when Karr explains that she and her sister misheard the phrase "It ain't the heat, it's the humidity" for years, believing people said, "It ain't the heat, it's the stupidity." Brilliant. And Karr is always forthright about both the perceptions of the child and the adult narrator. The descriptions of her parents spare no one involved, but in the end, do not condemn nor place their heads on stakes.Karr also organizes her book well--it becomes a story, not just the relating of her childhood. The people become characters, including herself. When we read, we often look for elements which we can relate to, and the inner workings of family, as well as how they differ from the outer workings of the world, are issues with which we all must struggle.Not to mention Karr has found herself a brilliant title.Now, while the book was enjoyable, for the most part, child abuse, especially sexual abuse, isn't a topic most people enjoy reading about. When Karr published _The Liars' Club,_ she was one of the first in the movement to reveal so graphically her sufferings. Perhaps _The Liars' Club_ can be viewed as a book that opened dialogue for survivors of sexual abuse, and probably did many a great service. However, the climate has changed a bit. With books like _Running with Scissors_ filling the shelves, discussion of abuse has become common, almost to the point of cliche. It's difficult to provide catharsis for the reader, almost as difficult as it is to provide healing for the self after such trauma. Abuse in a memoir cannot be merely revelation, it must be an integral part of the story that serves the plot as well as the development of the character/memoirist. It cannot be there just because it happened, just like any event in the book cannot be there just because it occurred in the writer's life. And the reader wants some catharsis, some acknowledgment of the memoir that the writer not only lived through the abuse, but was able to thrive. We don't want a victim. Harsh, maybe, but we readers don't just want a tell-all, we want a tell-all that also makes a good story.
What do You think about The Liars' Club (2005)?
This book has compelling images and moves along quickly. After reading about half of it, though, I realized that I was really irritated by the voice. She doesn't have much grace, and the wisdom she professes to have doesn't ring true. I started to feel very manipulated. She has plenty of painful memories, and she writes about them with a lot of sensory detail. But I didn't come away with a sense that she had made peace with her past, nor that she had a greater understanding of what life was all about. It was more like "I have had this horrible stuff happen, look at me, look at me!" Then I heard her talk and realized that she is very, very angry and needs a lot of attention. She opened a poetry reading in Berkeley by cursing at the introducer and saying he was worthless. This totally sealed my opinion of her, which is that she hasn't gotten to a higher level of grace or wisdom but is selling her story because it sells. Period.
—Linden
NOTE: THE LIARS'CLUB four-star rating does not mean that I "really liked it."I usually love memoirs. (Well, not ones written by narcissists or liars.) If I were young enough to have read Mary Karr's THE LIARS' CLUB (1995) when I was in my early twenties, I might well have appreciated it to the extent that the work deserves. Alas, another if. Unfortunately, I've grown old, old enough to "wear my trousers rolled" (T.S. Eliot). And in the past year, this old person has read too much material (fiction and nonfiction) that presents in detail the awful, the ugly, the sickening, the infuriating experiences of children whose parents are not fit to be parents. With my zero-tolerance for the neglect and abuse of children, I found making my way through THE LIARS' CLUB a chore that I kept postponing.Yes, I could have put Karr's memoir back on a shelf or added it to my bookswap list after I had read fifty (or fewer) pages; but some unidentifiable voice, for some unknown reason, stopped me from abandoning it. Was I supposed to finish the book so that I would learn what most dimwits know: rotten parents don't necessarily create rotten children??? I've never accepted Huck Finn's assertion that "a body that don't get started [ital.] right when he's little ain't got no show." The memoir's last section, an account of events that occur seventeen years after the previous section, seems to be the author's way of (1)dealing with old issues and (2)declaring: "See -- good children can happen to bad parents." And if that is what Karr wants to say, my response is "What's your point?" No, I didn't miss the "point" -- I dismissed it. While I'm glad that I'm not STILL reading THE LIARS' CLUB, I am, nevertheless, glad that I HAVE READ it. It's a valuable book -- if for no other reason than its potential to get readers to notice that where blame lies is not what matters. Granted, we can explain and justify and excuse the behavior of irresponsible parents by looking at their parents and at the unfortunate circumstances that helped to produce each generation. But to what end? In a description of some of her mother's "crying jag[s]," Karr does reveal what really counts: "Then she would bawl like a sick cat, hanging her head in her hands. . . and saying that we didn't understand, and that it wasn't our fault that she was crying. Like we cared whose fault it was instead of just wanting it stopped"(132). The alcoholism, the violence, the lunacy, and so on. STOPPED. All else is not very useful commentary.
—Reese
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'.
—Dorothea
