“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.” So says Barnes and Noble in the first line of their summary of Karr’s first memoir. But it was the publication of her recent memoir, Lit, that sparked my interest and made me go back and start at the beginning. Now, I can’t wait to get my hands on Lit.

Karr tells her story of growing up in the white hot desert town of Leechfield in southeastern Texas in the early 1960’s with her sister Lecia and her parents. In many ways, it’s typical of other memoirs I’ve read, particularly Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, in that each author led a life like no one I ever heard of. Yet, this type of memoir is published frequently enough to make me think that this may be the norm, and I’m the odd one with a childhood bereft of crackpot parents who didn’t drown their sorrows in booze and leave me and my siblings to fend for ourselves on the mean city streets.

Because of course Karr’s parents, Charlie Marie and Pete, do just that. And Mary Karr, who considers herself first and foremost a poet, tells the story of trying to survive under these conditions. And she tells it with such humor, wit, and irreverence that she had me laughing out loud at the escapades without ever feeling real sorrow at her plight. She lived through one apocalyptic childhood and yet it is her love for her family that shines through it all. Right away on page 43 she wants you to understand just how bizarre her life is:

“The four of us tended to eat our family meals sitting cross-legged on the edges of that bed. We faced opposite walls, our backs together, looking like some four-headed totem, our plates balanced on the spot of quilt between our legs. Mother called it picnic style, but since I’ve been grown, I recall it as just plain odd. I’ve often longed to take out an ad in a major metropolitan paper and ask whether anybody else’s family ate back-to-back in the parents’ bed and what such a habit might signify.”

A good part of the story centers on the Liars’ Club that Mary’s dad is a part of: a bunch of Texas oil workers who regularly get together to drink beer and swap tales, trying to out-do each other in the whopper department. Of course, so many people in Mary’s life lie to her that the Liar’s Club is a metaphor for most of the characters in the book that have anything to do with her during her young years. Highly recommended. ( )

Very bleak childhood of a girl in Texas. She grew up just down the road from me. Very sad. ( )

The book is described as "between howling misery and howling laughter and the reader vears toward laughter"......Not for me Mostly just misery, pretty sad misery. ( )

Like a feverish dream (or nightmare), Karr's first memoir unfolds in a stream-of-consciousness style which captures what it's like to be a child growing up in a spectacularly dysfunctional household. Karr's gullibility, loneliness, fear, and audacity will be recognizable to many people--even if they had relatively happy childhoods. What struck a chord with me was Karr's relationship with her older sister, Lecia. Being an older sister myself, I know that having a sibling can be one of the best things and also one of the worst things about growing up.

If you like this book, I'd also recommend checking out Cherry, Karr's follow-up memoir about her adolescence. ( )

Gripping memoir of a girlhood in East Texas and Colorado. Born to an alcoholic but functional father and a mother who bounces between full blown alcoholism and active psychosis, the author and her older sister largely raise themselves. When their parents finally divorce, the girls opt to live with the mother, figuring she'd get into too much trouble if left unsupervised. But she and her new sleazeball husband prove too big a challenge for the girls.
The book is both captivating and terrifying. Imagine the voice of Scout Finch relating the To Kill a Mockingbird plotline with periodic appearances by Hannibal Lechter. That's The Liars' Club.
This is the first of Mary Karr's three memoirs. I'm eagerly looking forward to the second and third. ( )