The Liars' Club

by Mary Karr

dysfunctional family is any family with

more than one person in it. In other words, the boat I can feel so lonely in actually holds us all.

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.

The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness.

Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn’t enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry, which I took to be gospel for longer than I care to admit. Maybe the only

thing worse than being a Republican was being a scab.

Esso

I had always thought that what I lacked in my family was some attentive, brownie-baking female to keep my hair curled and generally Donna-Reed over me. But my behavior got worse with Grandma’s new order. I became a nail-biter. My tantrums escalated to the point where even Daddy didn’t think they were funny anymore. I tore down the new drapes they’d hung across the dining room windows and clawed scratch marks down both of Lecia’s cheeks. Beating me didn’t seem to discourage me one whit. Though I was a world-famous crybaby,

Clearly, we had, all this time, been doing everything all wrong.

Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.