“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 … 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.
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I loved this book! It had me both laughing and in tears at times. It was a bit difficult to get started but then it just flowed.
It is a favorite of mine, will read again.
“It ain’t the heat, it’s the stupidity.”
This was Mary’s and her sister’s misinterpretation of their mother’s explanation for why she stitched two mattresses together for sleeping in sultry, swampy, carcinogenic Leechfield, Texas, in 1961. Mary Karr’s memoir is thick with the language of my own Texas childhood, a language as rich as any Southern tongue reconstructed by Faulkner or Welty. I have all but forgotten that language, but somehow Ms. Karr remembers every colorful phrase.
The Liars’ Club chronicles the poet’s wildly unstable, lower middle-class childhood with a hard-bitten, hard-drinking, but loving father and a beautiful, artistic, volatile mother gripped by grief of Sophie’s Choice proportion. The mother’s dark past made her nervous, a condition Mary explains can range from mildly out of sorts to full-blow psychosis. Mary’s mother was Nervous with a capital N. There’s also a “ring-tailed bitch” of a grandmother thrown into the mix. The book is lyrical, humorous, and at times, horrifying.
I recommend the audible edition narrated by the author for the full effect. It’s a quick listen at less than 4 hours and immensely enjoyable, despite being pretty darned troubling too. I also recommend reading Mary Karr’s 2009 interview with The Paris Review, The Art of Memoir No. 1, where I learned she was involved with David Foster Wallace, who had her name tattooed on his arm.
Since I read Mary Karr’s THE ART OF MEMOIR, I expected this memoir to be a 5 star memoir. It wasn’t. It was just OK.
A great story. Nothing left out. She is an excellent writer.
This is one of the funniest stories I’ve ever read. It is also the most tragic. we all have Tales to tell of our childhood, some are funny, some are sad. This is both funny and sad. I wouldn’t miss reading it for the world
Well written, sometimes almost funny, but mostly sad. The writing well always saves the day for me, even if I don’t love a book.
This book is a powerful reminder of the effect of secrets and lies on individuals and families. This emotional account of the authors early years is moving and heart wrenching. Mary Karr is an inspiration and her book is a page turner.
Wonderfully written and a fascinating and difficult story.
Excellent but didn’t like any of her following books
Mary Karr writes with an eye for realism and humor, traits she probably had to learn in spades in order to survive her family as she grew up in a blue-collar coastal town in Texas. Her humanity and grace, and wicked, wicked, sense of humor, shines from each page.
There was too much bad language in it for my taste
Very interesting writer
Interesting childhood memories.
There’s a reason this book is cited as the gold standard of modern memoir. Mary Carr’s characters leap off the page & wedge themselves in your brain, and her delicious descriptions of both people & places immerse you in her world. This is memoir story telling at its finest.
Very disappointed. I found I did not care about the characters – especially the author – at all!
Since its release, The Liar’s Club has become a classic in the memoir genre.
Unbelievable.
Loved it – but don’t believe it’s all true.
Read this quite awhile ago but remember enjoying it.
In this powerfully funny, razor’s edge tale of a fractured girlhood, prize-winning poet and critic Mary Karr conjures up the terrors and joys of growing up in a swampy East Texas refinery town, at the epicenter of a family full of passionate, volatile attachments. In a voice stripped of self-pity, in language reinvented with a raw authenticity and brilliant energy, Karr shows readers a “terrific family of liars and drunks . . . redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth.”