The Liars Club
- Author : Mary Karr
- Publisher : Penguin
- Release Date : 2005-05-31
- Genre: Biography & Autobiography
- Pages : 352
- ISBN 10 : 9781101650738
Download a high-res version of the Liar’s Club logo: PNG - JPEG - PDF. Photography: Patrick Houdek / Web Design: SITES BY SIX4. HOME SHOWS SHOTS INFO.
- Rod Serling is the president of the 'Liars Club' featuring Norm Crosby, Betty Walker, Bill Bixby and Betty White.
- The Liar's Club is an elite group of spies in Regency England, skilled at espionage and out to steal their leading ladies' hearts.
“Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet's ear.” –Oprah.com The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of Mary Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation. The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, 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 age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. 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.
July 9, 1995
The Thousand-Yard StareBy SHEILA BALLANTYNE
THE LIARS' CLUBA Memoir.
By Mary Karr.
MAGINE you are a child of 7 and this is your sharpest memory: 'Our family doctor knelt before me where I sat on a mattress on the bare floor. . . . He was pulling at the hem of my favorite nightgown. . . . 'Show me the marks,' he said. 'Come on, now. I won't hurt you.' '
Thus opens 'The Liars' Club,' Mary Karr's haunting memoir of growing up in East Texas in the early 1960's, virtually motherless, and fiercely seeking to understand her parents, their lives and their relationship to her sister and herself.
Daddy drank every day, but 'he never missed a day of work in 42 years at the plant; never cried -- on the morning after -- that he felt some ax wedged in his forehead; never drew his belt from his pant loops to strap on us or got weepy over cowboy songs the way some guys down at the Legion did.' Mother was a different story. 'Looking back from this distance, I can also see Mother trapped in some way, stranded in her own silence. How small she seems in her silk dress, drinking stale coffee.'
The Liar's Club Movie 1993
A reader could conclude that no one speaks in this memoir except the narrator, and that would be almost true. But even mute, this mother is the story; give or take a few exceptions, she's the whole story. Charlie Marie Moore Karr, a k a Mother, is a huge enigma that by her very presence, her silent, raging sadness and fierce passions dominates the family. She is an enigma not only to her daughters and husband, but to the set of children whom she abandoned years before giving birth to Mary and her older sister, Lecia, and whose existence she has held as a corrosive secret. And she has remained an enigma to everyone, including the six men she has married and divorced, even Daddy, J. P. Karr, whom she married twice.
The Liars' Club turns out to be just a place where the men meet on their days off to play dominoes and drink in the back room of the bait shop. Mary Karr's father is mainly just a regular guy. It is her mother who takes on enormous, suffocating dimension.
The Liars Club
As Mother rarely speaks, it is left to the imagination of the daughters to attempt to translate her silences. While Daddy, who works in the oilfields of Leechfield, where Agent Orange is manufactured, has a sweet steady Texas grit, Mother has what her daughter calls East Coast longings. She is too refined for Texas, and is 'adjudged more or less permanently Nervous.' Born in West Texas, she had gone to New York, where she spent her youth and first marriages and went to the opera and to museums. Back in East Texas, she reads Camus and Sartre and tries to throw herself out of speeding cars while drunk.
In Mary's eyes, the most admirable thing about Charlie is that she's a painter. Daddy and his card-playing buddies in the Liars' Club build her a studio in the back of their house, and the first thing she paints on her visits home from caring for her own mother is 'a portrait of Grandma . . . from a Polaroid taken just before Grandma lost the leg.'
The Liar's Club Game Show
SHORTLY before the major catastrophe that's about to happen to these girls, Ms. Karr notes, 'I see Mother's face wearing that thousand-yard stare. . . . The back door she's staring through opens on a wet black night.' Charlie is immeasurably, palpably sad. Her art, in the end, is not enough to hold her -- nor is any art. She just reads Tolstoy, plays old Bessie Smith records and cries.
Ms. Karr's narrative tone is less sensational than it is elegiac and searching. Yet the brutality that underlies both family and place is never really absent. Both a rape and a molestation by a baby sitter haunt her early childhood, and while Ms. Karr graphically depicts those incidents, she neither dwells on nor attempts to understand them. It is almost as if in the Karr family, living in this hardscrabble place in Texas, such events, like the weather, are regarded as just the way things are.
A few jarring asides to the reader early on threaten to unbalance Ms. Karr's account: 'Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while.' Later she writes: 'My father comes into focus for me on a Liars' Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can't but write it in the present tense.'
Happily, by Chapter 3 Ms. Karr has hit her stride, conveying the horror of her dying grandmother's tirades and her amputated leg. In these moments it is Lecia, who's only two years older than Mary, who assumes the adult role by sitting on the bed and stroking the old woman's hand.
The choice not to fictionalize this life seems a brave decision (and perhaps, for Ms. Karr, the only one), yet at the same time it proves to be a more difficult one from the standpoint of the reader. The job of single memoirist can be daunting. There are moments when one almost wishes for some fictional shaping in the service of a truth larger, and more potent, than the literal one. It would have helped in those early scenes that focus on her mother and father if she had stepped aside and allowed some imaginative flashes of possibilities to fill those blanks that a young child can't know. One longs for some scrap of remembered dialogue, some interaction, as we anxiously wait to get to know these parents, this quiet sister, this courageous narrator. Even imagined dialogue would have provided some relief from the relentless and often lonely task Ms. Karr has set herself. As the memoir progresses, her parents' voices slowly begin to emerge, creating a tentative but welcome counterpoint.
In the conflagration that is prefigured in the enigmatic beginning of the book it is Charlie Karr who, if there was ever any doubt, finally becomes that central character she has always yearned to be. At the end of a long night, Ms. Karr meditates on her mother's final catastrophic act, observing: 'A weird calm has settled over me from the inside out. What is about to happen to us has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.'
Mary Karr's attempt to resurrect her parents and her past has seemed an almost overwhelming task. At times, it feels as if the book itself were trying to decide whether it can reasonably contain all that she needs to discover, and all that she needs to let go, in order to become her own creation. (She is a poet and essayist who now teaches at Syracuse University.) Not the least of her assets in this quest is her haunting, often exquisite phrasing of states of being and qualities of mind that resonate long after a page is turned. In the end, it is her toughness of spirit, as well as her poetry, her language, her very voice, that are the agents of rebirth that accompany her on this difficult, hard-earned journey.
A Serious Fury
The Liar's Club Movie
Mother was her own kind of rock. She seemed distracted all the time, moving in some addled way through the rising sea of chores Grandma thought up. The only time she displayed much more than a low-level pulse was when Grandma talked her into spanking me about once a week, and then only if I really fought back.
Don't get me wrong. My mother's flailings at me didn't bring enough physical hurt or fear to qualify as child abuse. Her spankings were more pathetic than anything. She was way too scared of hurting anybody to hit with much of a sting. She must have been scared, too, of her own temper, or of feeling anything at all, because, as I said, she stayed pretty blank-eyed no matter what we did unless Grandma hollered her into action. . . .
But some kind of serious fury must have been roiling around inside her. Sometimes, instead of spanking us, she would stand in the kitchen with her fists all white-knuckled and scream up at the light fixture that she wasn't whipping us, because she knew if she got started she'd kill us. This worked way better than any spanking could have.
-- From 'The Liars' Club.'