The Liars' Club: A Memoir FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
May 1997
The Liars' Club was published in 1995 to rave reviews and quickly raced its way to the top of the bestseller list in 1996 with the paperback release. James Atlas has called the memoir "a classic of American literature" and notes, "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."
Karr's is an unsentimental recollection of an anguished childhood, rank with memories of rape and riddled by the emotional and actual bullets of her parents' brutal conflicts. Against the mosquito-infested backdrop of a small East Texas town, Karr employs humor rather than anger as she unravels the secrets that propel the destruction of her alcoholic father and crazy mother.
This is a painful story of a family reeling from want of love, remembered and told with compassion. This memoir's success is a testament to the appeal and caliber of Karr's writing. The Liars' Club was a National Book Circle Award Finalist and a PEN Nonfiction Award nominee and was selected as one of the best books of 1995 by People, Time, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club. And to the girl whose father is the club's undisputed champion mythmaker, they exude a fatal glamour - one that lifts her from ordinary life. But there are other lies. Darker, more hidden. Her mother's unimaginable past threatens the family's very sanity. Mary Karr looks back through younger eyes to exorcise those demons: a mad, puritanical grandmother; a vast inheritance squandered in one year flat; endless emptied bottles; and the darknesses inflicted on an eight-year-old girl. This voice explodes with antic, wit, stripped of self-pity. Miraculously, it makes a journey into joy. Here is a "terrific family of liars redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth."
FROM THE CRITICS
Michiko Kakutani
Ms. Karr has written an astonishing book. -- New York Times
Publishers Weekly
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. First serial to Esquire. (June)
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