The Liar's Club

The Liar's Club

By Mary Karr

A trenchant memoir of a troubled American childhood from the child's point of view describes growing up in a an East Texas refinery town, life in the midst of a turbulent family of drunks and liars, a schoolyard rape, and other dark secrets.

I give it a big old Eh, or maybe a Meh.  I really struggled with this prompt, and eventually went with this one as it was just on a top fifty list of memoirs, and I agree the writing is nice, but it felt hazy, without a consistent through line.  We just wandered from anecdote to anecdote without saying anything.

I think there are definitely better memoirs out there - The Glass Castle is one of my favorites - and maybe this one just wasn't what I was in the mood for.  You do have to slow down for this one, try to savor the writing, because it is really very well written.  Karr is a poet, literally, and her memoir is like poetry too: beautifully written, with words that sound meaningful, but when you string them together it's more about a feeling than a scene. It sounds nice, but makes no sense. The Liar's Club just meandered almost unbearably, especially in the first section.

And I guess what I'm also struggling with is this weird juxtaposition of calling the book The Liar's Club, and seeing how much mental space her father takes up, but in actual practice it seems like her mother is really the figure that looms largest in her life, and in the book: from her mental breakdown, bringing her own mother home to die, leaving with the kids to Colorado and getting married multiple times, finally reconciling with her husband in Texas again, and this final revelation about her prior family and the loss of her first children  - I felt like this is the person who should have have the focus of the book trained on her.  Instead, she feels almost like a supporting character. 

Even though the author notes that she spoke with her mother on the subject and gave her the final book to read, there's no depth to her mother in The Liar's Club, she's just this opaque, semi-crazy out of control person - what on earth was she thinking for all of this?  Why was she making the choices she made? If you've got this resource, why not use it? Get into this woman who apparently was married off at fifteen but cared so much for her mother that she wouldn't evacuate from a hurricane.  The title feels misleading - Karr's father doesn't have half the mystery and allure that her mother has, for better or for worse (mostly worse).

And Karr herself, as a child of seven or eight, simply doesn't have any autonomy or direction apart from that her parents allow her.  While the things that happened to Karr (and the things that almost happened) are horrifying, I never feel like we get any better sense of why they're happening than Karr as a child did.  There is no clarity or knowledge that author Karr brings to her childhood confusion.

31: A Book About A Family