The Liars' Club
Mary Karr, 1995
Penguin Group USA
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143035749
Summary
Winner, PEN/Martha Albrand Award
When it was published in 1995, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, as well as bringing about a dramatic revival of the form.
Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all.
Now with a new introduction that discusses her memoir's impact on her family, this unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as "funny, lively, and un-put-downable" (USA Today) today as it ever was. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 16, 1955
• Where—Groves, Texas, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Goddard College
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—teaches English at Syracuse University.
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 Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University and, in 2015, was chosen to deliver the commencement speech at the university.
Memoirs
Her memoir 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 troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. She was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart.
She followed the book with another memoir, Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood.
A third memoir Lit details her "journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic," came out in 2009. She writes about her time as an alcoholic and the salvation she found in her conversion to Catholicism. She does, however, describe herself as a cafeteria Catholic.
In 2015 Karr published The Art of Memoir. Based on her writing class syllabus at Syracuse, the book is aimed at novice writers yet may also appeal to the general public for its humor and for its insights into the writing process. The book includes an extensive list of Karr's recommended memoirs in the appendix.
Poetry and essays on poetry
Karr won a 1989 Whiting Award for her poetry. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2005 and has won Pushcart prizes for both her poetry and her essays. Karr has published four volumes of poetry: Abacus (1987), The Devil's Tour (1993), Viper Rum (1998), and Sinners Welcome (2006). Her poems have appeared in major literary magazines such as Poetry, New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly.
Karr's Pushcart Award winning essay, "Against Decoration." was published in the quarterly review Parnassus (1991). The essay argues for content over poetic style—insisting that emotions need to be expressed directly and with clarity. She criticized the use of obscure characters, imprecise or "foggy" descriptions of the physical world, and "showy, over-used references. She also holds that abstruse language—polysyllables, archaic words, intricate syntax, "yards of adjectives"—serve only as an obstacle to readers' understanding.
Karr directly criticized well-known, well-connected, and award-winning poets such as James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, Vijay Seshadri, and Rosanna Warren (daughter of Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren). Karr favors controlled elegance to create transcendent poetic meaning out of not-quite-ordinary moments, presenting James Merrill's "Charles on Fire" as a successful example.
Another essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," was published in Poetry (2005). Karr tells of her move from agnostic alcoholic to baptized Catholic of the decidedly "cafeteria" kind, yet one who prays twice daily with loud fervor from her "foxhole." In the essay Karr argues that poetry and prayer arise from the same sources within us.
Personal life
In the 90s, Karr dated David Foster Wallace, who once tried to push her out of a moving car.
Awards and honors
1989 - Whiting Award
1995 - PEN/Martha Albrand Award for The Liars' Club
2005 - Guggenheim Fellowship. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/30/2015.)
Book Reviews
The title of the poet Mary Karr's extraordinary new memoir is taken from the name that came to be attached to the informal club formed by her father and his drinking buddies....Ms. Karr inherited her father's remarkable gift for storytelling, and she has used that gift to create one of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years....Her most powerful tool is her language, which she wields with the virtuosity of both a lyric poet and an earthy, down-home Texan.... She's able to describe everything ... with equal poise, precision and wit. It's a skill used in these pages in the service of a wonderfully unsentimental vision that redeems the past even as it recaptures it on paper. Ms. Karr has written an astonishing book.
Michikio Kakutani - New York Times
At its best, in the hands of a writer able to command the tools of the novelist— character, scene, plot—the memoir can achieve unmatchable depth and resonance. The Liars' Club, which recently reached No. 5 on the paperback best-seller list, is a classic of American literature. Tending her postage stamp of reality, as Faulkner advised, Mary Karr conjures the simmering heat and bottled rage of life in a small Texas oil town with an intensity that gains power from its verisimilitude —from the fact that it's fact.
James Atlas - New York Times Book Review
Her literary instincts are extraordinary.... Karr has the poet's gift for finding something huge and unsayable in a single image...gothic wit and stunning clarity of memory.
Boston Globe
This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a back-up opinion.... It's like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poet's precision of language and a poet's gift for understanding emotion and a poet's insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astounding event.
Molly Ivans - The Nation
Crackles with energy and wit...a wild and wooly contribution to the annals of American childhood.
Los Angeles Times
Although Karr, a prize-winning poet (The Devil's Tour) survived a nightmarish childhood with a violent father and an alcoholic mother who married six times, she bears neither parent any animosity in this candid and humorous memoir. Karr and her older sister grew up in an east Texas oil town where they learned to cope with their mother's psychotic episodes, the ostracism by neighbors and their father's frequent absences. Karr's happiest times were the afternoons she spent at the "Liars' Club,'' where her father and a group of men drank and traded boastful stories. Raped by a teenager when she was eight and sexually abused by a male babysitter, she developed a fighting spirit and impressed schoolmates with her toughness. Karr vividly details her parents' divorce and eventual remarriage, as well as her father's deterioration after a stroke. It is evident that she views her parents with affection and an unusual understanding of their weaknesses.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. A major theme running through;The Liars' Club is the difference between Mary Karr's parents. "With Mother," Karr writes, "I always felt on the edge of something new, something never before seen or read about or bought, something that would change us.... With Daddy and his friends, I always knew what would happen and that left me feeling a sort of dreamy safety." Karr's mother is artistic and glamorous, while her father is down-to-earth. How do these contrasts lay the foundation for the Karr's family life? Did you empathize with one parent more than the other? Did your feelings change as the book went on and more was revealed about them?
2. Despite the horror that permeated Karr's childhood, characteristics like humor, honesty, and courage pervade The Liars' Club. Karr does not pass judgment on her family or tell us how she thought they should have behaved. Would you have liked to have known more about Karr's feelings about the events that she recounts? In what instances? Or were you able to discern how she felt through her actions? What emotions did you experience while reading The Liars' Club?
3. Karr is a character in her own book, as well as its author. On the page, she's a tough, scrappy kid who also has a tremendous sensitivity and devotion to the people around her. As readers, we understand the interior joys and terrors that make her such a rich and vivid character. How do you think she seemed to the people around her? If her mother was to make a list of her strongest characteristics, what would they be? If her father made such a list, would it differ in any way?
4. Karr tells her story for the most part from the point of view of a child, and what a child sees and understands. How might the story – and Karr's perceptions – change if she had told it from the point of view of an adult, with the benefit of everything she has come to understand about her upbringing and her family? What would be gained, and what would be lost?
5. The author's mother, Charlie Marie, never fully realized her dreams of becoming an artist. The author, who as child began to write poetry, was able to realize her creative ambitions. What gave Karr the strength to pursue that ambition? Was it "sheer cussedness," one of the traits that characterized her as a child? Do you think the sadness of her mother's unfulfilled dreams somehow propelled her? Do you think it had anything to do with her relationship with her father?
6. How would you characterize Karr's relationship with her sister, Lecia? Does it change as the book progresses?
7. After Karr's grandmother dies she sings, "Ding dong the witch is dead." Were you surprised that she was happy her grandmother passed away? What in the grandmother's character was so oppressive? Do you think her grandmother contributed to her mother's despair and alcoholism? How important a part did she play in Karr's life?
8. In a recent interview Karr said that she had previously tried to write a novel based on her childhood experiences: "When I tried to write about my life in a novel, I discovered that I behaved better in fiction than I did in real life. The truth is that I found it easier to lie in a novel, and what I wanted most of all was to tell the truth." What do you think of this statement? Karr's father was famous for the tales he told during meetings of the Liars' Club. At any point did you feel that the author was perhaps altering or stretching the truth?
9. In the introduction to this guide, Karr states that while on tour to promote The Liars' Club people from all walks of life told her they identified with her story. Do you identify with the Karr family? Did this influence you while you were reading the book? Is it "the essential American story," as one reviewer stated?
(Questions issued by publisher.)