The Liars' Club [Paperback]

Many people have pointed out that humor is a good way to keep from crying all the time. Author Mary Karr has clearly gained that perspective as she describes one of the worst upbringings you could have short of being abducted and sold to be an abused female slave at age six. How Ms. Karr and her sister managed to become functioning adults is the main mystery that this book helps explain. They were both highly intelligent, brave, aggressive and not easily intimidated. Those admirable qualities shine through the dingy details.

But if you stand back from your childhood, many of the daily tragedies are pretty funny . . . if you can see those events as happening to someone else who can take it. Ms. Karr clearly has gained that perspective.

The book opens with a strange scene, the author's sharpest memory of her early years. She was seven. The family doctor knelt before her where she sat on a mattress on the bare floor. He was pulling at the hem of her favorite nightgown and inquiring, Show me the marks." There were other strangers milling around in her house and Ms. Karr didn't want to hike up her gown with them around.

Ms. Karr reports that it took three decades for that memory to unfreeze from an isolated scene into a memory of all that occurred. When you find out what preceded it, you'll be emotionally chilled to the core of your soul. The book then goes into flashback mode until the pivotal event resurfaces in full detail about mid-way through the book.

Be prepared for some pretty chilling moments. This is not your fairy godmother's memoir. Ms. Karr was raped, molested, and even found herself at the wrong end of a gun. She experienced moments even more frightening and disturbing than those.

The book's title is quite an ironic one. Her father was a born story teller who paid no attention to the actual truth if that got in the way of a good story. Everyone knew this . . . and that was part of the fun. He liked to get together with his drinking buddies to swap such tales, and Ms. Karr was welcome to join him until she began to develop an adult female shape.

While most will think that's the origin of the title, a closer reading will probably convince you that the reference is to Ms. Karr's family itself, where none of the adults would ever speak the truth about the central facts of their current and past lives. Living in a pretend world was their way of coping with huge sorrow and even greater fears. As they say, not everything was what it was cracked up to be.

If you ever visited small towns in Texas and Colorado during the 1960s, you'll recognize the culture that Ms. Karr loves to lampoon . . . even as her family managed to outrage pretty much everyone around them. She has an amazing ability to be self-affirming in her uniqueness and independence as she describes those days that most of could learn from. You survived if you looked out for yourself. If you didn't look out for yourself, no one else probably would.

Has a family ever engaged in more outrageous and deliberately provocative behavior? Well, not very many. You sense that universal embarrassment that all children feel about their families, but with enough of an emotional distance to bring us into the situation in a way that doesn't overcome us with self-pity.

Among the many unpleasant and tragic events, Ms. Karr sees life as fun, funny and full of potential. It's that joie de vivre that separates this book from the kind of sob story that many such memoirs turn into.

She also sees life as offering the potential for redemption . . . when we face ourselves and the truth.

In addition, Ms. Karr can write very well. She can set a scene, turn a sentence, shape a story and deliver a punch line with crude power. Here's a brief example:

"Daddy's boots scuffed down the steps. The screen banged again, and I heard what I quickly figured out was the glass lasagna casserole shattering on the patio after him. "It's her birthday, you s__ofa______," Mother yelled. Lecia just wound that French twist into a tight coil and said, "Tape Ten, Reel One Thousand: Happy Godd___ Birthday."

Don't miss this book. If you like what you read, I suggest you go on to read Cherry as well, by Ms. Karr. The material isn't as pungent as in The Liar's Club, but the writing is equally wonderful.

Mary Karr is an American poet and essayist, as well as a professor of English literature. She has written several books on her life, but this is the memoir that shot her to fame, in 1995. Obviously The Liars' Club is not a novel, so don't expect any wild departures, though by the standards of non-fiction this is pretty wild.

The book tells the story of Mary's childhood, or part of it, in a refinery town on the Texas coast, then briefly in Colorado, in the 1960s. There is a coda set in the 1980s, when she was a young adult. But what made her childhood special, in the wrong and weird more than good sense, seems to have been her dysfunctional family, and especially a mother who was many times married, saw herself as a failed New York artist, and was at times plain neurotic. Then there was the authoritarian grandmother who was dying of cancer, and a more benevolent father who nevertheless spent his time taking Mary to the 'liars' club', a group of tall-tale telling, drinking, and card-playing friends. So Karr tells of her family's Bohemian home life, their regular brushes with road and hurricane deaths, the universal censorship of their prying neighbours, school fights, sudden house moves, parental drinking binges, etc., etc.. And it all comes out as a tough and sometimes heart-wringing tale that nevertheless manages to convey the optimism of a coming-of-age story.

The Liars' Club has sometimes been compared to Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, as both describe in tender and positive terms an objectively bleak childhood. Karr's book is in some ways a more grown-up version. The author went through terrible experiences, having been raped twice. The book is a testimony to the humour, resilience, and stoicism of Karr and her indomitable sister. And its style is moving and compassionate without being overburdened, confirming that poets are often the best writers of prose. At the same time, I thought Karr under-exploits the liars' club theme, which after all is the book's title. There is actually not that much on her father, and more local colour could have been provided through that device. Indeed, this inevitably does not have the characterisation of a novel, and the antics of Karr's mother get somewhat repetitive. I found my attention flagging a little in the book's second half, and thought this has less pace than Angela's Ashes. Still, three stars is perhaps a little grudging: this is more like a weak four stars. For though not a page-turner at every page, The Liars' Club remains a moving and finely written piece.

In a similar vein to ANGELA'S ASHES, this book vividly recalls details of the author's childhood with a capricious, artistic Mum and a downbeat Dad, both far too fond of the bottle. Mary brings a poetic insight and language to the story and there's a heartwarming ending. Read it!