a book
The Liars’ Club
Mary Karr · 1995 · 320 pages
A trenchant memoir of a troubled American childhood from the child's point of view describes growing up in a an East Texas refinery town, life in the midst of a turbulent family of drunks and liars, a schoolyard rape, and other dark secrets. 25,000 first printing.
recommended by 7 people
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Padma Lakshmi
“If any memoirist in this country tells you they haven’t been influenced by The Liars’ Club, they are either lying or uninformed. The genius of Karr’s memoir is that it’s really not about her, but about her parents, told with love and innocence while fearlessly illustrating their faults.”↗
Sarah Paulson
“Karr survived a terrifying childhood with her sense of humor intact, and her memoir of that time makes my eyes water just thinking about it. She grew up with an emotionally unavailable father and a “nervous” mother. As she writes, ‘I should explain here that in East Texas parlance the term Nervous applied with equal accuracy to anything from chronic nail-biting to full-blown psychosis.’ I moved around frequently as a child, and it was a revelation to learn that someone else had lived this kind of life and grew up and hadn’t just made peace with her own pain but saw it as a gift.”↗
Sally Field
“Different from McCourt, Karr tells her story in retrospect. From the beginning, the reader gets the sense that she’s remembering the child she once was as the adult she is now, trying to find the traumatic events of her life, some that have remained hidden even from herself. Effortlessly, she moves back and forth, from childhood to present day to before she was born. It’s wonderfully funny, and brassy, and lonely. From the get-go this memoir was my example of how to allow your own voice to come through, to talk on the page. So much so that I had to hide it away for fear I would start sounding like that little East Texas girl and not the one from Southern California that I actually am.”↗
