-- Memoir of an Awful Childhood Contains Beauty & Hope

books:


	• The Liars' Club: A Memoir Mary Karr Penguin (Non-Classics), 2005 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 136 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

-- Memoir of an Awful Childhood Contains Beauty & Hope

"The Liars' Club" is a memoir that mostly focuses on the author at ages seven and eight. The details begin with a mystery and continue with vivid and horrific details. I found it worthwhile reading because its story was riveting, its language masterful, and its scope complete. There's no wonder that it won impressive awards and was on The New York Times' Bestseller List for more than a year. Still, contrary to others' testimonials, I did not laugh; not once. Perhaps you will. It doesn't matter. What does matter is the depth of emotions the author shares and the beauty of the prevailing human interactions. The traumatic events are conveyed well and the entire work is handled with explicit and clever simplicity. Mary Karr's journey was devastating and overall it is hopeful. I recommend this book.

Even with all the "Not Rightness", beauty is a word that describes much of this book. Incidental delights alleviated some of the ugliness: bears foraged garbage, family meals were sometimes atop her parents' bed, she got to ride horses, and fields "spilled" with morning glories, bluebonnets and fireflies. But much more important than incidentals, was the intensity to which the reader becomes familiar with the family and extended family. They dramatically rose and fell to occasions... while a little girl and her sister grew up faster than anyone should have to grow.

The author attentively makes the best of situations and in doing so she copes and thereby hopes. As a child, Ms. Karr observes. She evaluates. She has respect for her own idiosyncracies and she makes both understandable and wise decisions. When crucial, she relies on her life-saving (and also very young) big sister, Lecia. Years later, the reader gets to see that she does get answers to the childish hopes for explanations and we are grateful.

Her family withstood challenges and love prevailed. In the beginning and throughout, Lecia (the sister) was deservedly appreciated. The ("Nervous") mother shared her art and worldliness. The father had good work ethics, created well-intended childhood events, stood up for his wife, and was proud of the author's ("Pokey's") accomplishments. The shared closeness of his "Liars' Club" friends (not the only liars of the book) was treasured. And in the end, those friends, mother, daughters, doctor, and even an old army officer was supportively generous. Finally, the author does get-together with her mother to resolve the mysteries that clouded traumatic times. And when all is said and done, we get an overview that is, in its understanding and acceptance, ultimately beautiful.

The book's structure supports the theme. I liked that the author's formative years (1961, 1963) were presented as strong as they were and occupied the bulk of the book. Circumstances demanded that weight. Then I liked the jump to 1980 with child-to-parent and parent-to-child developments. Unpleasant though some of it was, the progression was satisfying. Again, the journey is worthwhile. Once you start reading it, I believe you'll be compelled to complete it, too.

Further, the style is fine-tuned and honest. I marveled at the language and even the variable use of (and lack of) quotation marks. The tone is natural and, at the same time, it's brilliant. When the action is cruel, the heart-wrenching clarity works. Some raw descriptions were startling, while all of it rang true. Moreover, it helped that the book was obviously a joint family effort and that effort validated it's truth. Consequently, the entire approach -- language, style, honesty, and use of alternate memories -- kept my attention.

Therefore, I highly recommend reading "The Liars' Club". The horrors are real. The caring runs deep. Kudos to Mary Karr for so openly sharing her life with the reader. You won't envy her youth, but you will probably become absorbed in the journey and admire some of the child she was and the woman she became. I give this book a FIVE-star rating.

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Excellent Read

I read it over a three-day period and I hated for it to end. Great story and very well composed. Very glad I read it.

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The Liars' Club: A Memoir

A-1, I am a avid reader, this book "blew me away" and I want to share this book with family and friends. Such brutal honesty.

As Big as the Texas Sky

Mary Karr's memoir winds all over the place, beautiful prose, but it's everywhere at once. I found her style tedious, introducing an event and simultaneously introducing another, so the reader is constantly having to shift places, times, feelings. It felt to me like listening to someone who has all kinds of wonderful ideas and stories, gets you interested, then that reminds him of something else and he's off on that story, but you're still wondering what happened with the first story. The entire book reads like this from page one to 320.

I didn't find it as hilarious as was stated, although there were funny moments, black funny moments. You have to be comfortable with the vagaries of life to find her story funny, but she does come off as a kid I would have loved to know. She's strong and smart and has guts. All of her characters are presented in their full light, and I found each major character delightful. I didn't find her mother all that crazy. I thought her father was wonderful. Her grandmother must have been terrible, but even there, Karr was able to present her as not all bad. Karr is able to write events, the dark, sad events, by reporting what happened in minute detail without inserting her current feelings, only the feelings she was having long ago as a child.

I can't give the book more than 3 stars for a couple reasons: the prose, despite its beauty, is simply tedious - as big as the Texas sky, going on and on and on like the telephone poles along the highways, neverending, never changing, sigh, when are we going to get there, anyway?

Two, I simply cannot believe her ability to remember the little pink nosegays on her nightie or underwear, the soft peanut shell on her fingernail, or her mother's beige silk dress with the Chanel belt. A young kid knows designers and remembers exactly what her mother was wearing? However, like several other reviewers have mentioned, her mother married at 30, her child was 9 when Grandma came home to die at "50," so how could she be so loose with that fact when she's so precise with the others? Perhaps her grandmother was 59, but it seems she exaggerated here for emphasis. What else is exaggerated for emphasis in the book?

Although a major character, I didn't feel the book was specifically about her father, who was in the Liar's Club, so why did Karr use this title? Are all the characters storytellers of some sort? Is Mary Karr the biggest storyteller of them all? I believe her overall story, but I am left with enough questions that never allowed me to feel much about anyone in the book because there were too many specifics where it didn't count (pink flowers emerging from green leave-pattern on her underwear) and not enough where it did count. It was just enough to create a level of underlying suspicion for me that made me not care much about these people. I hate being lied to, you know?

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Fab, but unfinished

A wonderful memoir - honest and riveting. But I would like to know more, after that harrowing childhood, how the author fared as an adult. She mentions she married. Did it last, does she have children? I developed such emotional involvement with her as a child that I felt at loose ends not knowing more about the woman she grew into.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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. 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 twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. Now with a new introduction that discusses her memoir?s impact on her family, 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.

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