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The Liar's Club

by Mary Karr, Bernadette Dunne (Read by)

3.88 of 5 stars 3.88 · rating details · 24,104 ratings · 1,303 reviews

In a powerfully funny, razor's edge recollection of a fractured childhood, Mary Karr, who grew up in a swampy East Texas refinery town, tells of being the epicenter of a family full of fierce, volatile attachments--a "terrific family of liars and drunks . . . redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth." Excerpted in Granta.

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Published July 1st 1998 by Books on Tape, Inc. (first published January 1st 1995)

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Apr 27, 2013 Dorothea rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Well hot damn and hallelujah! Something good has come out of Texas after all!

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...more

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Feb 11, 2008 Heather rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Memoir fans

Shelves: memoir

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 that she did...more

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Jan 16, 2011 Emily Green rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 hea...more 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.(less)

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Dec 30, 2012 Merry rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: no one

Recommended to Merry by: BCBC book club for January

The tragic life of two sisters, as told by the younger sister, in a small East Texas. Total dysfunction and quite sad. The author writes of every bad detail with no good news between the lines. The final chapters will bring some explanation for their terrible upbringing. The reviews on the back of this book claim it to be "wickedly funny", "astonishing, moving memoir", "howling misery and howling laughter, with the reader veering towards howling laughter", and, "a crazy family tormented by unsp...more

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Oct 30, 2009 Melody rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

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 t...more

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Sep 22, 2011 Reese rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 (ficti...more 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.
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Oct 04, 2010 Mariel rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: mommy dearests

Recommended to Mariel by: my ex

I read The Liar's Club when I was lonely and alone during a time I wasn't (in theory) supposed to be that way. Was it good company? Not really. I took away more than anything else from this book the feeling of trying to force acceptance of something that is unacceptable. I mean as a work of writing, as I really can't speak for Karr's heart and soul to what she feels and believes always (changing one's mind does happen, or so I'm told).

There's a good way to write a memoir about super fucked up ti...more I read The Liar's Club when I was lonely and alone during a time I wasn't (in theory) supposed to be that way. Was it good company? Not really. I took away more than anything else from this book the feeling of trying to force acceptance of something that is unacceptable. I mean as a work of writing, as I really can't speak for Karr's heart and soul to what she feels and believes always (changing one's mind does happen, or so I'm told).

There's a good way to write a memoir about super fucked up times and living situations and complicated people therein: don't try to rationalize pretty sick, pretty petty and selfish behavior with an in-short summation of how they aren't that bad after all if you didn't really earn that conclusion. I totally get being confused about it. You do want to like them if you ever idolized something about them, such as being glamorous like Karr's mom was (not something I ever idolized. I did admire creeps with great senses of humor, though). Yeah, evil to you moms who are easy with strangers (until they get past the stranger phase) would make great gay icons in the vein of Joan Crawford. Someone would get a kick out of it, sure, but sometimes you really, really need more than that. People are complicated: you don't need to whitewash over anything with an in-short anything. One relationship doesn't define another one. What matters is being there when you really needed them and it doesn't sound like her family were at all. Tell us what they meant to you and trust us to be able to work that other stuff out for ourselves. That's why she had such a fucked up life to write a memoir about it: it happened to her. Being funny and great looking in alligator boots (poor gators. they are ill treated in this book indeed) hardly matters beyond that? So yeah, the attempted understandings felt fake to me in the storytelling way. About papa, too. He failed her. If she remembers the babyhood feeling of safety, great, but c'mon you can have mixed feelings about it all. This is like being... lied to? (Shut up, Mariel. No one is laughing.) A therapist would say shut up and tell us how you really feel. The rest of this is bullshit to hide the fact.

I was saddened by the sis growing up without her. That was my favorite part, how big sis joined adults sooner and left Karr behind to waddle in everlasting teen adolescence by her lonesome (know how that goes). I felt that was understanding how that happened and still admitting it was lonely. The whole book should have been like that.

I needed more than that if I'm gonna take the time to get to know someone by reading their memoir. Funny, not funny enough to over come the rest.(less)

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Mar 24, 2008 Liz rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition 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 (which is, in itself, q...more

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Jan 26, 2012 Ellen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So that's how you end a memoir. Case closed.

I can't imagine the restraint and discipline required to write this book. Karr doesn't really tell you a damn thing. She lets the questions accrue, and you go along for the ride as they spool. There are so many questions (Wait, what the?) that you forget about half of them. And she never mentions any of them explicitly anyway, as in "I always wondered about..." Nope. She doesn't really explain. You're just in this fog of incident and chronology, the sh...more

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Jan 16, 2011 Richard rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is the first of three memoirs that make up her life in the small refinery town of Leechfield (nee Groves) Texas. "The Liar's Club" is a reference to Karr's father a bigger than life character who spent his adult life working for Gulf or some other refinery in this backwater east Texas town (best known as the place where Agent Orange was produced). The books name derives from her father's penchant for drinking and telling famously big tales to his friends Cooter et al who relish his role as...more

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Aug 25, 2008 Jamie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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. Sometimes i...more

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Sep 24, 2007 Adam rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adamsfavoritebooks

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 East Texas....more

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Mar 28, 2009 Naida rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Another "poor me" childhood memoir. While I sympathize and am aghast at much of what happened to Mary Karr during this book, I just didn't feel the pull of emotion or empathy you would expect to come from a book like this.

Jeanette Walls' the Glass Castle - a similar story of a young girl's growing up in rural Appalachia was better written and more engaging than this book

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Mar 04, 2008 Oceana9 rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition 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, cover her own face with...more

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Oct 15, 2012 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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: good recommendation from a good source. It is a painful coming-of-age autobiographical narrative written from the adult author's point of view (not written from the author's point of view as the child). Impossible as it may seem, it is told with look-back wisdom, love, and some hard humor. Karr is an excellent writer. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and wholehear...more

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Jul 23, 2008 Neil rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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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Apr 15, 2013 Bryan Furuness rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: first-person, 2013, memoir, nonfic, woman-writer, storytelling

I don't write a lot of customer reviews. And when I finished this book, I didn't think it needed my review. For one thing, I'm probably the last person in the hemisphere to read it; for another, this book is so good and has been popular for so long that its ratings must be sky high, right?

At the time that I'm writing this review, the Goodreads rating is 3.88.

Over 2000 people gave it one or two stars.

People, for real. What are you looking for in a book? Karr has given you a gem, a freaking gem...more

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Jan 21, 2013 Jane Mackie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Perhaps my expectations were too high going into this, but I did not find the narrative very compelling. Karr is likable, throughout -- her childhood was as horrifying as the dust jacket indicates and she reports it all with a kind of plucky good grace-- but all her crazy tales evoked more pity than interest. Her prose at times veers toward purple, and I may be too literal, but passages like this wholly confound me:

"For some reason, suffering got lined up in my head not with moral virtue or bein...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Sean Laprise rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Every child deserves to have a great childhood in which they live, learn, and grow from the help and love of their parents; however, not everyone is born into the best circumstances. The Liar’s Club, by Mary Karr, is a very emotional, touching, and sentimental life story about the author and her older sister growing up with a tough, rugged, and troublesome childhood, with very dysfunctional parents. Karr is a renowned American poet, a great essayist, and is extremely well-known for her famous a...more Every child deserves to have a great childhood in which they live, learn, and grow from the help and love of their parents; however, not everyone is born into the best circumstances. The Liar’s Club, by Mary Karr, is a very emotional, touching, and sentimental life story about the author and her older sister growing up with a tough, rugged, and troublesome childhood, with very dysfunctional parents. Karr is a renowned American poet, a great essayist, and is extremely well-known for her famous and powerful memoirs. Throughout her life, author Mary Karr has gone through many difficult and serious problems, including becoming a terrible alcoholic, and from what transpired when she was just growing up as a kid.
Mary Karr was just a little girl growing up in the run-down industrial towns of Texas, who struggled to live well in the life she was born into. Karr’s mother had very serious mental and emotional health problems that affected the family almost all of the time, and her father was a very bad and vigorous drinker. Karr’s father, along with herself, would spend a great amount of time with other drinkers in a large group known as the liars club. The men in this club would tell many over-exaggerated stories and tales, and Mary would usually come along with her father to be with him and keep him company. The real and true relationships that Mary had with her family was with her older sister Lecia and her very old grandmother, and Mary needs to use these strong relationships in order to grow up in a developed and conscious way.
Karr has written her memoir in a very beautiful and authentic way, and she uses many different styles of writing to go along with her extravagance. The author presents a great deal of irony in the name and the meaning of the Liar’s club. In the memoir, Mary describes her father in having the best stories and imaginative mind, however, the title of the Liars club shows that all of the stories, events, and tales he talks and describes are all made up. The name of the memoir and the bar also tie along with the inspiration and ideas for Mary’s potential at becoming a great writer and author. The author also uses the idea of foiling characters between Lecia and Mary, who very opposite, different from each other, and fight a lot throughout the book. In addition, she also uses many pivotal story plot changes that show where significant changes are occurring in the story for the main characters, and many literary devices to display her tremendous writing style.
I would recommend this memoir to any reader who is eager to enjoy a great read. This is the type of story that a reader will really pick up on very quickly, and will always be eager to move on to the next page or chapter. To narrow down to a very particular type of reader, I would recommend this story to individuals who have a strong liking and interest for memoirs. In my opinion, this memoir is one of the most unique and suspenseful stories where when there is so much conflict already in place, more conflict and problems continue to rise for the protagonist. One of these being the death of Mary and Lecia’s grandmother where they begin to face a coming of age moment, and the reader really begins to feel this conflict progress from sadness to a learning experience in a sense. Even after the book, we learn that the protagonist deals with alcohol problems which relate back to the origins of a tough childhood. However, they continue to tackle the challenges along the way, and any reader should make an attempt to read this phenomenal life story.
I am still in shock of how people/authors like Mary Karr can take their memories and create such a fantastic story of the troubles of growing up in struggling position, and arise from it all in the end. Karr’s abilities in poetry assisted her in her beautiful display of writing and elegant style. Her use of strong literary devices and well descriptive characters made the story literally come alive within each and every word. Furthermore, her strong and powerful relationship with her older sister and grandmother truly helped her survive growing up in very bad times. Overall, I loved the book and I wish to continue to read other pieces of Karr’s great works.
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Jan 10, 2013 Mattybakes is currently reading it · review of another edition

The Liars Club – Review
Matt Baker
The Liars Club, a memoir written by Mary Karr begins In Media Res with a traumatic memory of her mother, Charlie, being taken away. At age seven, Mary trembles as the family doctor, gently asks to see where she is hurt. She has no bruises, and is embarrassed he keeps asking her to remove her clothes. Not realizing until later that he just wanted to see her. Eventually, Mary's daze clears up, and she realizes that her father, Pete, is working the night shift at...more The Liars Club – Review
Matt Baker
The Liars Club, a memoir written by Mary Karr begins In Media Res with a traumatic memory of her mother, Charlie, being taken away. At age seven, Mary trembles as the family doctor, gently asks to see where she is hurt. She has no bruises, and is embarrassed he keeps asking her to remove her clothes. Not realizing until later that he just wanted to see her. Eventually, Mary's daze clears up, and she realizes that her father, Pete, is working the night shift at the oil refinery, and her mother Charlie has been taken away for being “nervous”, she is alone and her fear of being “nervous,” like her mother is instilled in her.
Mary tells of the one thing from her mother’s childhood she knows. There is a photograph taken when Charlie was two years old, she got sick and nearly died of her raging fever. The doctor after failing to bring her fever down finally deemed Mary’s mother of hopeless and dead before morning. Mary's Grandmother decided they should take a photograph of the child before she passed, and from this the image of Charlie propped on the front porch, that Mary carried with her came.
Mary’s Grandmother was diagnosed with brain cancer. Her Grandmother self-medicates with a six-pack of beer every day, instead of taking morphine. She finds fault with the Mary’s and Lecia’s behavior daily and has their mother beat them, their mother being emotionally beaten down herself, and goes through with whatever her mother wants.
Mary tells of one of her few pleasant childhood memories, which comes after her Grandmother dies. She tells of her father taking her to The Liars' Club. How she sits happily spraying cheese whiz on crackers while listening to her father spin a tale about his father, who died by hanging. Amused, because Mary knows her grandfather is very much alive, but listens as her father paints a picture of his father as an unstable man who falls through his roof and dies unexpectedly.
The rest of Mary’s childhood is filled with hard times and very few pleasant things. Mary tells of going through financial strain, how this impacts her father, and how her mother resorts to drinking, reading, and crying. The family endures a strange case of insomnia, each member walking aimlessly around at night with half their clothes, hoping for sleep to find them.
After her parent’s divorce and until Mary moves out, her life is filled with her mother and stepfather’s heavy drinking, as Mary and her sister, Lecia, try to escape it all by heading to the stables. Her mother begins to be addicted to painkillers on top of the drinking and this only adds to her fiery temper towards those around her. Mary’s life is filled with hoping her mother doesn’t commit suicide and trying to escape the life she has with her. She begins to take short trips out of Texas, eventually finding a small university in the Midwest, where she earns her master’s degree in poetry, eventually writing her own story.

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Aug 02, 2012 Melissa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

I’m not a big fan of memoirs, but this is one of those genre defying books that I’m so glad I read. The Liar’s Club is the true story of Mary Karr’s childhood. From a small dusty town in Texas to a mountain home in Colorado, Karr and her sister grow up with their rough father and glamorous mother; both of whom are usually too focused on their own lives to bother with their children much of the time.

Some of Karr’s descriptions are so visceral. I felt like I could smell her grandmother’s bad brea...more

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Jul 23, 2012 Alice Osborn rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone writing their memoir

The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr begins with a traumatic childhood memory of fire, the town sheriff in their home and a doctor asking seven-year-old Mary to show him her marks. Mary Karr remembers this moment vividly, but she doesn’t remember everything that happened that night: later she needed others to “paste together” what happened the night her mother went crazy and threatened to kill her and her older sister. Why did her mother do such a thing? All is revealed in the final pages, but the build...more The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr begins with a traumatic childhood memory of fire, the town sheriff in their home and a doctor asking seven-year-old Mary to show him her marks. Mary Karr remembers this moment vividly, but she doesn’t remember everything that happened that night: later she needed others to “paste together” what happened the night her mother went crazy and threatened to kill her and her older sister. Why did her mother do such a thing? All is revealed in the final pages, but the build-up and suspense Karr creates for her reader is worth the wait.

I’ve taught memoir for six years and one of the biggest barriers for my students is feeling that they can’t really remember what happened to them, and if they can’t really remember, then it doesn’t belong in a memoir. They might as well give up! Karr’s should be an inspiration for anyone who feels that they can’t remember—she very plainly tells her reader when she doesn’t know something (“The principal’s name was Mr. Janisch, and other than the fact that the kids called him Janbo, I remember not one distinct feature of his.”) But on the other hand, when she wants to call up the details, she begins her sentences with “I remember when,” which is a beginning memoir workshop prompt.

The interesting thing about The Liars’ Club is that the “I remember” phrases weren’t edited out, giving the book a much more languid and ethereal feel. She is a memoirist who uses emotional truth, rather than factual truth. After all, she is a gifted poet who blends fiction and fact when necessary so her creative freedom isn’t tamped down. For instance, she fictionalizes her hometown, Groves, Texas, in southeast Texas in the Port Arthur region known for its oil refineries and chemical plants. “Leechfield” is as much a character as her sister is (“The sheer stink of my hometown woke me before dawn. The right wind could bring you a whiff of the Gulf, but that was rare. Plus the place was in a swamp, so whatever industrial poisons got pumped into the sky just seemed to sink down and thicken in the heat.”)

Karr intended to write her true, messy life and she succeeds through her humorous voice, colorful language and extraordinary sensory details. She effectively captures her emotional truth of memory, even when others remember differently. Sometimes her memories and her sister’s memories of the same subject don’t match, and she discusses that. Mary hated her grandmother, while her sister Lecia was very sad when the old lady died. Karr states, “I content that her [Lecia’s] memories are shaped more by convenience than reality: she also recalls tatting as fun, and Ronald Reagan, for whom she voted twice, as a good guy.”

She reveals her father’s, mother’s, sister’s and her own flaws in careful measure. She wasn’t a great kid—she was lazy, she pooped in corners, and shot up the neighbor with a BB gun after cursing him out at eight years old. By showing the good, bad and ugly of her and her family, we believe her and her truth, even when the circumstances of her life make us think, “There’s no way that happened!”

Karr was a published poet of two collections before she penned The Liars’ Club after her divorce to perform a reckoning on not only her life, but her parents. She ends the book with an image of white light and truth. Only a poet could rely so heavily on metaphors, similes and sensory images of every variety. In lesser hands, her metaphors would overwhelm her prose and dilute her story, but with her, they make the prose sing.
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Jul 02, 2012 Reno rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-for-school, 2011

Meh. This book was unsatisfying for me, somehow. I didn't feel like a lot happened and the ending especially was dull. That being said, it is a memoir and therefore based on a person' life, which means (ideally) the author didn't/couldn't just make up their own story. But still. The story being told wasn't one I was really interested in. I did like bits and pieces of the prose. Karr can write, that's for certain. I liked how she would make note of where her memories turned fuzzy and of things th...more

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May 14, 2012 David Groves rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Mary Karr does not have a James Frey problem. Her memoir of her childhood, The Liars' Club, reads genuinely. There is very little dialogue because she can't remember it that accurately. When there are blank spaces in her memory, she presents them as blank spaces. The events read genuinely, as well. Alcoholics are always placed in interesting situations, and this book has many. Every chapter reads like a short story, with an interesting climax.

This book has a great ending, too, the value of which...more

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Apr 12, 2012 Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir

I've just reread THE LIAR'S CLUB as part of a creative nonfiction class--it stands up well to a second look. Karr is a deft, gritty narrator who milks drama from even the smallest moments and portrays true drama without sensationalizing it. For memoir writers looking for models, Karr is an excellent teacher. She doesn't shy from depicting the dark, even horrific, qualities of her parents and still manages to make us love them as much as she does. She explores the fickle nature of memory without...more I've just reread THE LIAR'S CLUB as part of a creative nonfiction class--it stands up well to a second look. Karr is a deft, gritty narrator who milks drama from even the smallest moments and portrays true drama without sensationalizing it. For memoir writers looking for models, Karr is an excellent teacher. She doesn't shy from depicting the dark, even horrific, qualities of her parents and still manages to make us love them as much as she does. She explores the fickle nature of memory without letting her exploration detract from the story itself. Her structural choices--a beginning that flashes forward to the middle and then three chronological chunks in time--show writers how well-selected memories can function well together without any need for the author to account for missing years. Most of all, she shows us how a powerful personality can infuse every word and thus delight the reader.

Here's a sample:

Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while. It went long unformed for me, and I want to keep it that way here. I don't mean to be coy. When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn't quite fill it in.

Oh--one last thing I admire about this book. Karr tells such a good story I often found myself wondering whether she was pushing memoir's boundaries by making up details. But her title, her great admiration for her father's capacity to lie, and the layers of behavioral lying she explores with her family make lying a unifying theme of the book. And so I'm willing to forgive her for stretching the truth. In fact, I suspect by stretching the truth she's written a truer story.(less)

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Mar 01, 2012 Greta rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography

I've read a number of modern-day memoirs and this one fits neatly into the middle. Neither too bizarrely horrifying nor too whiny, Mary Karr writes beautifully, pulling you along through her early childhood mostly, with a vivid and articulate rendering of what it was like growing up in her family. The book centers around her mother and father, who they were, what they were like and how their behavior affected the children who had no choice but to be along for the ride with them. Mary experienced...more

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Feb 09, 2012 Karo rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir

I bought this book because I had read so much about Karr's "sequel" memoir, Cherry. I figured that if I was going to read it, I should start at the beginning. I should make a note here that I'm a sucker for the memoir rage that's been sweeping bookstores nationwide -- there's just something ultimately satisfying about reading a book of life as opposed to a book of events. Karr met my expectations with a one-two suckerpunch. The Liar's Club is extraordinarily well written; I love Karr's colloquia...more

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Jan 16, 2012 Kira rated it 3 of 5 stars

The memoir genre has seen heavy rotation since The Liar’s Club came out, and I think that puts the book at a disadvantage today, as does what I consider a general desensitization to family dysfunction. This isn’t to say that I don’t believe Karr’s childhood was tragic—that goes without saying—just that in the era of reality television and tabloid gossip, it sometimes feels like everyone’s dealing with dysfunction. What family doesn’t include a drunk, or a liar, or a cheater? What kid hasn’t expe...more

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Dec 03, 2011 Diann Blakely added it · review of another edition

The proliferation of memoirs has already appeared on various literary pundits’ “Ten Worst Things About the Nineties” lists. Some argue that the form’s renewed popularity proves how pandemic contemporary America’s “culture of narcissism,” to use Christopher Lasch’s phrase, has become. Others point accusingly at a population of readers—and writers—who’ve grown too dimwitted or lazy to bother with fictional constructs like character development, plot, and complex points of view.

Certain works have s...more The proliferation of memoirs has already appeared on various literary pundits’ “Ten Worst Things About the Nineties” lists. Some argue that the form’s renewed popularity proves how pandemic contemporary America’s “culture of narcissism,” to use Christopher Lasch’s phrase, has become. Others point accusingly at a population of readers—and writers—who’ve grown too dimwitted or lazy to bother with fictional constructs like character development, plot, and complex points of view.

Certain works have sidestepped the barrage. In the mid-’90s, before Frank McCourt became a household name, Mary Karr's (mostly) heartrending but (mostly) wickedly funny THE LIARS' CLUB enjoyed unanimous critical acclaim, not to mention immense sales. (Mostly male) reviewers particularly praised Karr, a poet, for her expertise with those aforementioned fictional constructs—which, properly combined, we learned in high school, form a pattern that dates back to classical antiquity: Rising Action leads to Climax, which leads to Falling Action/Denouement. Herein lies the book's problem: the falling action was directly proportional to this reader's interest in the last third, despite a final scene of reconciliation that must, in fact, be true, for it's one that would be laughed out of an undergraduate writing workshop as too page were it presented as fiction.

Perhaps Karr would have done better to break the male model--one she likely adapted from Tobias Wolff, whom she has credited her kick-start into a new genre with THIS BOY'S LIFE, as well as poverty, though I'm puzzled by Syracuse's apparent status as the Scrooge of Academia--or at least the hard shell of sardonic humor that typifies her tone. For, as post-feminist theory has argued over several decades now, this pattern, which is based not on universal truth but on male sexual response, can be stubbornly antithetical to female experience. The real-life events in even an artful page-turner like THE LIAR'S CLUB will seem ample refutation to some, but it's interesting to consider other orders in which those pages might have been arranged.

(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE, updated as noted below)(less)

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Nov 15, 2011 Leah added it

The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr certainly earned its spot on the New York Times’ Bestseller List. The memoir, published in 1995, describes a wild, dangerous, troubled childhood punctuated by moments of love, and happiness. Before I was twenty pages in I was surprised that she had survived such a childhood long enough to write about it. The Liar’s Club is broken into three parts, and describes three important times in Karr’s life and the influence that her family, most notably her parents and older...more The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr certainly earned its spot on the New York Times’ Bestseller List. The memoir, published in 1995, describes a wild, dangerous, troubled childhood punctuated by moments of love, and happiness. Before I was twenty pages in I was surprised that she had survived such a childhood long enough to write about it. The Liar’s Club is broken into three parts, and describes three important times in Karr’s life and the influence that her family, most notably her parents and older sister, had on her childhood and how that affected the choices she made as an adult.
Part One is the longest and takes place in 1961 backwater Leechfield, Texas. Karr is only seven years old when her mother is taken away for being “Nervous.” Mental instability is a theme that continues through the entire memoir as the narrator herself admits that since early childhood she has known that she and her family are “Not Right.” The fact that seven-year-old Karr believes that she is inherently “Not Right” at such a young age leads to unexpected (and in my opinion astounding) reactions to events such as her rape, the death of her grandmother, the near-death of her sister, and even the dark night when her mother set fire to all of her possessions.
Throughout the memoir Karr remains very close to her sister, Lecia, even though they constantly pick on each other. When she remembers stories she’ll often put in Lecia’s version of events, or let her sister fill in the blanks where her memories end or get “fuzzy.” Karr frequently admits that she cannot remember a certain event in full detail. In one event, while describing Mother’s return from Grandma’s funeral, she points out that her family always remembers exactly what was worn at important events, even if they can’t remember what happened. Details like that add credibility to this story.
Her words are blunt and sometimes the narrative jumps off track while Karr describes something, like a meeting of the Liar’s Club, men who gather to drink and swap stories with her father, before returning to the story she was telling. This meandering style reminds me of the way a person talks when telling a story, and I imagine that if someone were to read this aloud, no one would know it was an actual book because the wording is so natural (every now and then I would even catch myself reading in a southern accent) and the story so personal.
The ending takes place seventeen years later when Karr and her sister are grown and moved away. Lecia is married and their parents are old and sick. Karr herself has changed, and although Part Three is the shortest in the book, it is the most revealing about her father, and the life her mother led that her daughters had been ignorant of. Anyone who had a rough childhood, or an obnoxious sibling, or a family secret will find themselves in this book.

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About Mary Karr

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 t...more

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“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.” — 209 people liked it

“Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...” — 39 people liked it

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