The Liars' Club: A Memoir

by Mary Karr

The Liars' Club: A Memoir

book data

2497 ratings, 3.84 average rating, 309 reviews (more data...)

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published

May 31st 2005 (first published 1998) by Penguin (Non-Classics)

binding

Paperback, 352 pages

isbn

0143035746 (isbn13: 9780143035749)

description

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 ...more

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All ratings | 5 stars (702) | 4 stars (942) | 3 stars (635) | 2 stars (179) | 1 star (38) | avg 3.84

all | this edition

Heather

Heather rated it:

02/11/08

bookshelves: memoir

Read in February, 2008

recommends it for: Memoir fans

Much praise has been written about Mary Karr's uniqe poetic voice. But, honestly? I found very little that was "special" about Mary Karr. Her writing style seems jarring; she has no problem jumping around in time in the middle of a paragraph. I also found it difficult to be compelled with her story. It was a story about growing up poor in a industrial town in Texas. I bet 30 other kids from that same town could have written a very similar book. Her prose was bland and it was evident th...more

Like this review? yes (3 people liked it)

2 comments

Dorothea

Dorothea rated it:

09/27/08

We must all hail Mary Karr!

I'm serious. Something good has come out of Texas after all!

The Liars' Club Mary Karr's memoir. She is fore mostly, a poet. This memoir of her childhood growing up in a small, east Texas oil town, 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 b...more

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Liz

Liz rated it:

03/24/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in March, 2008

recommends it for: Everyone - there's a time in everyone's life when it's useful, I'm sure

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

(3/24/08): I've decided that, perhaps, reading books on which the header on the back cover says, "A Wickedly Funny Account of An Apocalyptic Childhood" are, maybe, not really helpful for me these days.

Yes, the book was funny - in the beginning - despite the pain and the drama and the despair and the shock of the lengths that this author and her sister went to to survive. This dysfunctional family shows me how completely un-dysfunctional mine can be, when compared to them (w...more

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Adam

Adam rated it:

09/24/07

bookshelves: adamsfavoritebooks

Read in January, 2002

This memoir covers Mary Karr's childhood years to about her teens (with some later teen/early 20s at the end). I've read her other books and not been as impressed, but "The Liar's Club" is great writing about growing up in a strange family in an East Texas oil town, in the 60s/70s. Her dad is an oil field worker who is a great, loving father, but with a drinking problem, violent streaks, and her mother is an artist with clear mental health problems who doesn't fit in a little town in E...more

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Neil

Neil rated it:

07/23/08

Read in July, 2008

I don't often read memoirs, and not surprisingly even a well-written one like this didn't do a whole lot for me. One thing I did really like about it were all the times that Karr pointed out the gaps in her memory--the principal whose suit she could remember but whose face she remembered no particular detail about, the portions of a stressful evening that are lost to her. It was a nice way to pull back from a fiction that the memoirist can remember everything and to implicitly raise the question...more

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Catherine

Catherine rated it:

12/14/07

bookshelves: book-club

Read in December, 2005

I might have liked this book if it had been edited down by half. Karr meanders along and skirts important conclusions until the bitter end. I found many of the stories unimportant and dull. I did manage to trudge through to the final page. There are a lot better, more interesting memoirs out there.

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Connie L

Connie L rated it:

07/06/07

bookshelves: memoirs

Read in January, 2006

I did not really like this. I wasn't drawn in like I was with The Glass Castle. I didn't feel much of anything for the characters. Actually, I never even finished this book. Perhaps I should before I add any more judgement.

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Karol

Karol rated it:

11/21/08

bookshelves: currently-reading

I'm reading this for the second time. That's why I can already give it a five-start review! I'm in wonder of her excellent writing skills. And the characters are fascinating. I love how if she doesn't remember something she says so. Now, I'm suspect of all childhood memoirs--I don't see how people can remember enough details to write a really good story of their early childhood. I know I couldn't. But I no longer see it as terrible to make up the little details like what color shirt Uncle Riley ...more

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Casey

Casey rated it:

05/14/07

bookshelves: adults

Incredibly funny but pretty damn tragic. Karr tells a great story.

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Jamie

Jamie rated it:

08/25/08

Oh it was lovely. Really it was. Sad and at times hard to read, but quite honestly, it as My Home is Far Away, but more contemporary. Naturally, I am a big believer in the notion: memoirs are the most unreliable form of narrating. There's really no way a seven year-old, despite ample research and parental compliance, remembers word-per-word telephone conversations from 1963. But, who says the truth has to really BE the truth? A good story or an embelished story is JUST as meaningful. Some...more

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Mel

Mel rated it:

08/08/08

bookshelves: nonfiction

Mary Karr's book, The Liar’s Club tells the tale of her turbulent childhood in the fictional eastern Texas town of Leechfield, and later in Colorado. Karr's portrays members of her immediate family her sister Lecia, two years older than she; her father, Pete Karr, an oil refinery worker; and her mother, an emotionally unstable woman who hates living in Leechfield.
The text starts on a vague traumatic childhood experience—and never lets up. For this reader the memoir was difficult, and at p...more

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Sarah

Sarah rated it:

07/25/08

Read in July, 2008

Although this memoir has some absurdly funny moments and often a light and lively tone the adjectives I would use long before funny are: Vivid (sometimes too vivid), tragic, and gripping (all the more so because it is a memoir, not fiction although Karr is the first to point out how memory is deeply personal and therefore leans a little more toward fiction than fact). Everytime I read the back of this book I get peeved at how it's described as "funny". There's just too much sadness in ...more

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Alvin

Alvin rated it:

08/24/08

Read in October, 2006

recommends it for: East Texans

Sometimes, the old saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. Mary Karr’s memoir The Liar’s Club is a prime example of this intellectual real estate. In the introduction to the 10th Anniversary Edition, Karr admits that her motivation for writing this book is simply that she felt no need to “bother to make stuff up”. The book is a supposedly true account of her childhood growing up poor in Leechfield, TX, a small oil town in the Beaumont area. Told as she remembers it, with occasional...more Sometimes, the old saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. Mary Karr’s memoir The Liar’s Club is a prime example of this intellectual real estate. In the introduction to the 10th Anniversary Edition, Karr admits that her motivation for writing this book is simply that she felt no need to “bother to make stuff up”. The book is a supposedly true account of her childhood growing up poor in Leechfield, TX, a small oil town in the Beaumont area. Told as she remembers it, with occasional reference to details filled in by her sister, Lecia, the memoir is an open and honest tale that portrays life in Southeast Texas as those who really lived there are likely to remember it.

Reading The Liar’s Club, I couldn’t help but think of my own childhood. Though separated by nearly two decades and two counties, I felt at home while in Karr’s world. The world of refinery workers and piney woods mingled just the way I remember, and many of the details of life were the same. Accompanying this book were my own recollections of the Christmas of 1983 that my own mother went psycho, grabbing our best looking Christmas tree ever by the trunk, ripping it from its corner in the living room, streaming garland and icicles, yanking plugs, shoved it through the front door and hurled the entire thing from the front porch onto the icily muddy ground in the front yard, and declared Christmas Over.

The strength of The Liar’s Club is in this genuine feeling of true life that it portrays. We all have such memories. They are what shapes us and makes us who we are. Yet, we must never forget that we never stop growing and developing so that we are all strangers to our past. Karr conveys this feeling throughout the book, viewing her own past through the lens of her adult life. Referring to a trip to the Houston Zoo, she recalls how the captive pacing of a panther reflected in her mother’s glasses reminds her now of her mother’s trapped feelings, and wishes that should could go back and shake her mother by the shoulders, or at least offer her a glass of water, a feeling she didn’t feel as a child.

The primary conflict appears to be her mother’s instability. Unsure what to expect from a mother that tries to drive the family off the Orange Bridge, goes after her children with a butcher knife, and drinks herself to oblivion, Mary and Lecia do the best they can do as children – learn to weather the storms and find what joy they can in little things.

As a counter to her mother’s instability, however, her father comes across as a stalwart rock of stability. His portrayal paints what should be the archetypical portrait of a 20th century Texas man. Fiercely loyal to his family, Pete Karr is nonetheless defined by the lawless ethics of boomtown Texas. He never misses a day of work and always provides the financial support his family needs. He hides the horrors of his past and the war from his children, providing a kind of stability and stoicism that Karr recalls fondly. Yet get on his bad side, and he is a mountain lion unleashed. Somehow, even in his unbridled rage, Pete is honorable as portrayed here, in a Texas sort of way. When his wife and her new husband Hector visit to pick up some of her possessions after they had been separated for some time, he let his temper get the better of him. Fighting seemed to be a pastime of his, yet even when beating Hector to a pulp, he took the time to allow Hector to stand up and “practically dusted off Hector’s shirt and adjusted his collar before clocking him the second time”. Yet, after such a savage act, his daughters and even his wife respected him more. In a primal, savage way, he had earned back his honor, and in doing so, his beloved family.

Also notable is the way the brief time the girls spent in Colorado contrasts to the rest of their life in Texas. In Texas, the world Karr knew consisted of roughnecks, unions, oil refineries, and the occasional reference to a more East Texas logging lifestyle common farther from the coastal area of Leechfield. There were no cattle, no cowboys and no horses. Life consisted of such things as chemicals, visits to the dirty beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, and “every species of poisonous snake, spider and rabid biting creature available in that latitude”. The time Mary spent in Colorado, on the other hand, fits in more with the stereotype people expect when they think of Texas. Mary learned to ride horses there, and her mother learned a bit about the bow-legged men who lived with the horses and cattle. The world of hairy, dirty men working union jobs to support their families seemed a world away while in Colorado.

Although a memoir rather than fiction, The Liar’s Club is, as promised in the introduction to the 10th Anniversary Edition, filled with enough “jackpots” of real life and color to keep you turning the pages, seeking the next development in the plot. I feel that either Karr’s memory of her childhood is much sharper than mine, or that some events have been dramatized to flesh them out, but her story rings as true to me, or at least true enough. The details convey a feeling of frankness and honesty, and the story is engaging and riveting enough to overlook any possibility that it may or may not have been garnished with extra details.

For those of us who grew up with words such as “fixin’ to” in our vocabulary, such as “I’m fixin’ to whoop y’all kids”, Karr’s memoir is a cathartic blast to our pasts, even if our own mothers never went quite so far as to go after us with butcher knives. For anyone who had a bit more urban or pastoral upbringing, The Liar’s Club is a glimpse into the way life in 20th Century Southeast Texas truly was.
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Lillafiore

Lillafiore rated it:

05/03/08

bookshelves: memoirs

Mary Karr’s childhood is frightening, inspiring, and just plain crazy. I discovered whole new levels of crazy. The strength to survive was so primal, yet progressive in her sister Lecia. Her dad was the solid foundation of sanity and security, and the time when he wasn’t there, proved to be some of the worse moments of her childhood. The whole family worked well with each other, balancing each other out in some way that only makes sense to them. They work as counterparts to each other, suppo...more

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Sarah

Sarah rated it:

03/08/08

Read in March, 2008

recommended to Sarah by: Friends of the Library Sale

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Meghan

Meghan rated it:

09/27/07

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in September, 2007

I fluctuated between a 2 and 3 star ranking for this book, but ended up giving it a 2 in the end, obviously. It started out really strong for me, and I do think her writing is strong, however, there were parts where I kind of wondered where it was going. It is a memoir, so it was just following her life, of course, and I will say, she had a pretty crazy life (i.e. if you ever think you had some terrible things happen to you in your life, you should check this out, and maybe you won't feel so b...more

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Emily

Emily rated it:

(review of isbn 0140179836)

08/20/07

bookshelves: non-fiction

Read in August, 2007

One of the best memoirs I've read in a long time (though that's not saying much, since I haven't read nearly enough memoirs). The Liar's Club is about Karr's childhood in rural Texas, and awful as it was, you never for a moment feel that Karr feels sorry for herself or has any regrets (unlike some other memoirists out there who insist on bludgeoning you over the head in showing how extraordinary they are for overcoming their trials and tribulations. Augusten Burroughs and that guy who wrote A Ch...more

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Kristen

Kristen rated it:

01/08/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in January, 2008

recommends it for: children of chaotic homes

Very interesting characters, but this book felt like diary entries at important parts where you would expect some consideration of what the events meant to the author. I missed some sense of wholeness in the narrative, maybe some editorializing that linked different moments together. Perhaps this is a limitation of the memoir genre. Perhaps the interesting characters lead to an expectation that more would be "done" with them other than observing their behavior. The strength is in t...more

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Oceana9

Oceana9 rated it:

03/04/08

Read in February, 2008

recommends it for: Memoir buffs

A book from the "memoir craze," but really compelling in its starkness, and spare, truthful writing. A glimpse into what it's like to grow up in a sickening, ugly East Texas town (actually called Leechfield) with a crazy, alcoholic mother and an oil-drillin' father. Not schmaltzy or self-pitying for one second. My favorite scene is where the mother decides she doesn't want to be a "fucking hausfrau" anymore and proceeds to paint all the mirrors in the house with lipstick, cov...more

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Tracy

Tracy rated it:

08/18/08

Read in August, 2008

I have a long history with this book... first bought it in Dharamsala in 1997 when its cover reminded me of seeing the author read from it in person in St. Paul. Gave that book away to a friend before reading it (major sacrifice at the time for me, but I was attempting to adopt practices, in whatever small college-student fashion, for understanding impermanence and the suffering caused by clinging while studying Buddhism). Read it through a couple years later, and loved it for the language and...more

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