The Liars' Club in Around the Year in 52 Books

Mar 18, 2009 Ciara rated it it was amazing

Shelves: autobio-memoir, feminist-y-books, read-in-2009

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 kee 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. ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

Oct 18, 2018 Kallie rated it really liked it

Shelves: memoir

This is my second read of Karr's marvelous book. Why marvelous? Well, how many people could write about their wildly unpredictable, passionate, dangerous parents without holding a giant pity party devoid of humor. Karr does quite the opposite. She sees and says it all: the wonder, the terror, of living with such parents. The whole 'my careless parents' narrative is reduced to what it is: reductive. Karr mines such riches from her family upbringing. I can only admire her appreciative nature, her ...more

Like · see review

Sep 24, 2014 Andrea rated it liked it

A really hard book to read but I finished and thankfully there are some redeeming aspects of it. Beautiful story of a broken family. Love how Mary Karr writes.

Like · see review