HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr
Loading...

The Liars' Club: A Memoir (original 1995; edition 2005)

by Mary Karr

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
3,990803,022 (3.77)124
Biography & Autobiography. History. Nonfiction. HTML:??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… (more)
Member:jlatus
Title:The Liars' Club: A Memoir
Authors:Mary Karr
Info:Penguin (Non-Classics) (2005), Paperback, 352 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:
Tags:None

Work Information

The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr (1995)

Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 124 mentions

English (74)  German (2)  Spanish (2)  Dutch (1)  All languages (79)
Showing 1-5 of 74 (next | show all)
I know this is sort of a pinnacle of nonfiction - but I found it to be a bit boring and hard to follow. There were a few great short stories thrown into the bigger picture - but I am still not sure what the bigger picture is and lordy did it take forever to complete this book. I'd give it a 2.5/5 stars, but as that isn't an option, I rounded up.

If you're a writer or a fan of nonfiction, this one is probably already on your radar. Otherwise, I'd recommend passing this one up completely. ( )
  BreePye | Oct 6, 2023 |
Emotionally raw and viscerally honest, Liars Club is exactly what we in the 21st century expect from a memoir: a personal recollection of events from a segment of a life, told in a way that makes a complete story. That this is what we expect, is precisely because Karr virtually invented the modern memoir with this book. Highly recommended. ( )
  rumbledethumps | Jun 26, 2023 |
It must have been painful for the author to write this book, the way I feel when I think about writing out certain episodes of my life, and they thus remain locked in my head.
This is about a family that lives in a small town in East Texas, close to the Louisiana border. If I thought my own family was dysfunctional, well this book makes my family look like The Sound of Music. Mama has mental illness, complicated by alcoholism, Dad is a macho who also drinks a lot. We don't find out till the ending why mama is screwed up, but it's truly a wonder that those two kids made it to adulthood.
Well-written, it glides right along, and is hard to put down because you just want to find what is the next outlandish thing to happen to this family that will make you wince. ( )
  burritapal | Oct 23, 2022 |
I might have liked this better if I hadn't read "The Glass Castle" - just seemed too much the same although I know they are both real stories of young girls growing up in unusual circumstances. Mary Karr's mother was not suited for motherhood or the environment of eastern Texas. The writing was fine, I just couldn't particularly get into it. Did not finish (Not sure why I had this on my "later" list to read) ( )
  maryreinert | Nov 22, 2021 |
Un espectáculo de luces en el cerebro para poder vivir perfectamente con las mentiras. O algo así, dice la autora al final de esta biografía o, mejor, historia familiar divertida, dura, a veces sórdida. Pero en fin, como la vida misma. A veces creemos que estas vidas solo son posibles en remotos pueblos de la más remota Norteamérica profunda, pero estoy segura de que contadas tan bien como lo hace esta autora, se convierten en auténticas buenas novelas.
( )
  Orellana_Souto | Jul 27, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 74 (next | show all)
no reviews | add a review

» Add other authors (4 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Mary Karrprimary authorall editionscalculated
Dunham, LenaForewordsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
We have our secrets and our needs to confess. We may remember how, in childhood, adults were able at first to look right through us, and into us, and what an accomplishment it was when we, in fear and trembling, could tell our first lie, and make, for ourselves, the discovery that we are irredeemably alone in certain respects, and know that within the territory of ourselves, there can only be our own footprints. -R.D. Laing, The Divided Self
Dedication
For Charlie Marie Moore Karr and J.P. Karr who taught me to love books and stories, respectively
First words
My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark.
Not long before my mother died, the tile guy redoing her kitchen pried from the wall a tile with an unlikely round hole in it. -Introduction, December 2004
Quotations
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (1)

Biography & Autobiography. History. Nonfiction. HTML:??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

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Haiku summary

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (3.77)
0.5 2
1 19
1.5 2
2 65
2.5 12
3 206
3.5 41
4 314
4.5 22
5 222

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,251,939 books! | Top bar: Always visible