The Liars' Club: A Memoir
by Mary Karr
Date Reviewed: January 03, 2000
My sweet husband bought this book for me, because he heard Mary Karr on NPR, discussing her follow-up book, Cherry. Both are memoirs – The Liar’s Club covers her life from about age six to age eight, and Cherry (according to the interview) covers her teen years. She writes about growing up in southeastern Texas in a town called Leechfield, a stone’s throw away from Louisiana, whose major claim to fame is that Life magazine once rated it one of the country’s 100 ugliest towns. She’s very true to the vernacular of the area, too, and to its customs. She doesn’t pussyfoot around using terms such as “I’ll be on him like ugly on ape,” which made me downright homesick. Parts of this book, as is often the case with the truth, are disturbing. She writes about her rape at age 7 by a bigger kid – 14 if I recall correctly – and about her being forced to perform oral sex at age 8 by a grown man whose face and identity she can’t recall. She tells these things in her plainspoken, unflinching way, but the pain of recalling them somehow comes across. She talks about her mother’s mental instability – what folks in those parts called “Nervousness” – and the fights both parents had when they got drunk, which was often. She talks about their divorce, about being moved away from her father, all the way to Colorado. She talks about the night her older sister left childhood and was forced to enter the grownup world – when her mother held a pistol on her step-father (and the girls, draped across him to try to protect him) and threatened to shoot. She talks about the children she grew up with in Texas, and the reckless, dangerous “play” they took part in (including riding their bikes behind the fumigation truck, breathing in the fumes – the last one standing won). She talks about her grandmother’s coming to die with them, and about her hatred of the woman. She doesn’t give in to the temptation to write that she remembers her lovingly – Mary makes no secret that she sees her grandmother as a cruel, mean-spirited, critical old woman. The book ends leaving you ACHING for more. You want to know what happened to this 8-year-old, how she ended up being a poet and author. You want more details about the vague references she makes to her teenage drug addictions and promiscuity. “How did she get from there to here?” you ask yourself. I loved her story, and I loved the way she wrote it, and isn’t that what great books are about?
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