The Liars' Club: A Memoir
AN AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION NOTABLE BOOK
Rave reviews for Mary Karr and The Liars’ Club
“This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a back-up opinion…it’s like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poet’s precision of language and a poet’s insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing event.”
—Molly Ivins, The Nation
“9mm humor, gothic wit and a stunning clarity of memory within a poet’s vision…. Karr’s unerring scrutiny of her childhood delivers a story confoundingly real.”
—The Boston Sunday Globe
“Overflows with sparkling wit and humor…Truth beats powerfully at the heart of this dazzling memoir.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Elegiac and searching…her toughness of spirit, her poetry, her language, her very voice are the agents of rebirth on this difficult, hard-earned journey.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A dazzling, devastating memoir.… She paints an unsparing portrait of her struggle through a fractured childhood. Recounting one apocalyptic event after another, Karr’s voice never falters or rings false.”
—Vogue
“Bold, blunt, and cinematic…nothing short of superb.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Superb… unflinching and hilarious. The Liars’ Club has that smack-you-in-the-face freshness that marks books that endure.”
—Houston Chronicle
“A brave, brilliant offering to the world”
—Word
“An astonishing memoir of a ferociously loving and dysfunctional family…Karr uses the rich cadence of the region and poetic images to shape her wrenching story.”
—People
“From painful matters, Mary Karr has fashioned a book of great warmth and humor, honest to the bone. The Liars’ Club is the vivid recollection of a childhood no one would have chosen, but such is the ferocity of Karr’s love for her family, and the gritty eloquence of her voice, that we enter her world with pleasure and leave it with regret.”
—Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life
“The Liars’ Club shimmers with great truths, surely hard-won and well worth knowing. Mary Karr has made a fearless, poignant and often hilarious foray into the crazy darkness of an American childhood, and brought back a brilliant memoir of innocence and violence, loss and hope. This is a book of genuine humanity.”
—Bradford Morrow, author of Trinity Fields
“The Liars’ Club promises to catapult Karr to the exalted level of New American Voice. From the fabric of a troubled and traumatic childhood, she has crafted a tale that resonates with the universal uncertainty of childhood…Her poetic touch illuminates a thousand sentences. Karr has drawn black gold from the [Texan] mud.”
—Texas Monthly
“Roll over in the pure luxury of a good book, sucking this story up through the straw of clean-to-the-bone writing. Karr’s is a childhood remembered without sentimentality, written with a songwriter’s ear for cadence, dialogue, place and time. Karr stops your heart in less than five pages…the reader won’t forget this soon.”
—The Denver Post
“This is one hell of a story, and [Karr] tells it vividly…there is no question that this uninhibited and unsettlingly tough-talking book is driven by love.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A fierce, funny, and splendid memoir.…it is Karr’s uncompromising drive toward honesty, clarity and the exposing of secrets that drives the book.”
—The Voice Literary Supplement
“Karr lovingly retells [her parents’] best lies and drunken extravagances with an ear for bar-stool phraseology and a winking eye for image. The revelations continue to the final page, with a misleading carelessness as seductive as any world-class liar’s.”
—The New Yorker
“Raucous and gritty and keening and wild, Mary Karr’s memoir of growing up in a Texas oil town is long on suspense and short on sentiment. Here’s a loss of innocence in which the schoolyard rape gets little more than a footnote. Karr faces it down as she does cancer, madness, alcoholism and a vicious dog—with humor and a scrappy genius for survival.”
—Kathryn Harrison, author of Poison
“With language as hotly peppered as East Texas cuisine, Karr dishes up a main course of hard times, with wit on the side…it keeps you coming back for more.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A very funny and strangely hopeful book…the story was so engrossing, so painful, so darkly comic that I couldn’t put it down until my head started nodding onto my shoulder. It became more stunning with every page.”
—San Antonio Express News
“Prop your cowboy boots on the porch rail, open a cold longneck and listen to the voice of a born storyteller…captivating, hilarious and heartfelt.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Lovely and harrowing…Mary Karr is long on wit and short on sentiment, and her fierce love for these people who are her family hold the reader’s pity at bay. The Liars’ Club is surely one of the best books of this, or any, year.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Karr writes in captivating style…like a great Liars’ Club tale, her narrative meanders through tangents that are sometimes more entertaining than the point she’s getting to. She’s figured out a way to make every reader live through what no child should ever have to endure.”
—Newsweek
“The nonfiction equivalent of a Raymond Carver short story.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A dark, sassy, disturbing tale…it’s the story of an unconventional, spirited, childhood, and of parents whose love for their children was fierce and enduring, but desperately flawed.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Some childhoods are so pitiable you have to either laugh or cry…Karr’s memoir succeeds in taking the reader to both extremes. With a sure hand, she digs deep into her youth and hits black gold.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A warning should be posted on this book: May be hard to put down and get out of your mind.”
—The Columbus Press Dispatch
“This is an excellent book…it will endure and entrance readers for generations.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“One of the very best books to be published this year, and quite possibly the best account of childhood to appear in some time.”
—The Milwaukee Journal
“Breathtaking clarity and compassion…[Karr’s] most powerful tool is her language, which she wields with the virtuosity of both a lyric poet and an earthy, down-home Texan. It’s a wonderfully unsentimental vision that redeems the past even as it recaptures it on paper.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE LIARS’ CLUB
Mary Karr’s three volumes of poetry are Viper Rum, The Devil’s Tour, and Abacus. She has won Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and essays, and her work appears in such magazines as The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Parnassus, Vogue, and American Poetry Review. The Liars’ Club won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the best first nonfiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was given the Texas Institute of Letters Prize for best nonfiction. The sequel, Cherry, is also available from Penguin. Her grants include the prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award and the Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr is currently Jesse Truedell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, and lives in New York City.
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THE LIARS’ CLUB
A MEMOIR
MARY KARR
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1995
Published in Penguin Books 1996
This edition published 2005
20 19
Copyright © Mary Karr, 1995
All rights reserved
A portion of this book first appeared as “Grandma Moore’s Cancer” in Granta.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:
Canto LXXVI from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Copyright 1938, 1948 by Ezra Pound.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
“The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” from Mr. Cogito by Zbigniew Herbert. © 1974 by Zbigniew Herbert.
Translation © 1993 by John and Bogdana Carpenter. First published by The Ecco Press in 1993.
Reprinted by permission.
Photographs from the author’s collection.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
The liars’ club: a memoir/Mary Karr.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-65073-8
1. Karr, Mary—Homes and haunts—Texas—Port Arthur. 2. Women poets, American—20th century—Family relationships. 3. Port Arthur (Tex.)—Social life and customs. 4. Karr, Mary—childhood and youth. 5. Family—Texas—Port Arthur. 6. Karr, Mary. I. Title
PS3561.A6929Z468 1995
818’.5403—dc20 94-41252
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Garamond 3 Designed by Ann Gold
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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CONTENTS
Introduction by Mary Karr
The Liars’ Club
INTRODUCTION
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. He sat back on his knees and held the tile up so the sun through aged yellow curtains seemed to pierce the hole like a laser. He winked at my sister Lecia and me before turning to my gray-haired mother, now bent over her copy of Marcus Aurelius and a bowl of sinus-opening chili, and he quipped, “Now Miss Karr, this looks like a bullet hole.”
Lecia didn’t miss a beat, saying, “Mother, isn’t that where you shot at daddy?”
And Mother squinted up, slid her glasses down her patrician-looking nose and said, very blasé, “No that’s where I shot at Larry.” She wheeled to point at another wall, adding, “Over there’s where I shot at your daddy.”
Which tells you first off why I chose to write The Liars’ Club as memoir instead of fiction: when fortune hands you such characters, why bother to make stuff up? It also clues you in to Mother’s outlaw nature, and the degree to which—being long sober before she died—she’d accepted the jackpots of her past without much attendant shame.
I’d forewarned Mother and my sister Lecia about the events I planned to parade down the page, and from the git-go Mother said, “Hell, get it off your chest.… If I gave a damn what anybody thought, I’d have been baking cookies and going to PTA.” Lecia—a more circumspect spirit—also cheered me on, since I needed money for a car so desperately (being a single mom in Syracuse, New York, where bus service is spare and snowfall measurable in yards). Needing money is a supremely noble cause among our ilk, but Lecia would have backed any project I’d taken on. (“Going on a murder spree. Good, lotta bastards need killing.”)
The surprise bonus came after Liars’ Club (and later, its sister Cherry) became public: as taboos on former subjects vaporized in my family, the level of candor in my clan got jacked way up. There was no need to scudge anymore about Mother’s past propensity to get drunk and openly wag firearms, or the number of times she’d married (seven—twice to my Texas oil worker daddy).
As certain facts that had once scalded all our insides and almost decimated our clan got broadcast a thousand times, we got oddly used to them. Call it aversion therapy, but the events seeped in a little deeper. We healed more—though that had never been the point—through exposure. Our distant catastrophes became somehow manageable. Catharsis, the Greeks call it.
To wit: A cheerful morning talk show host in Houston, where my Republican sister had a massive insurance business, once turned to me on camera and said (in the chirpy tone designed to get a raisin cake recipe), “What is it like to have your mother try to kill you with a butcher knife?” The glossy smile might have stayed forever shining from her lipsticked mouth as she waited for me to concoct an appropriately chirpy answer had not my sister—sitting just off the set—shouted in, “It’s a big old fucking bummer.” So I broke up, then the camera guys bent over double, and the whole taping had to start over.
In pages to come, you’ll witness the awful burden strapped to Lecia’s back from grade school onward as she schemed to prevent our combustible mother from completely flaming out. About age eleven, Lecia had not only figured out a stick shift, she could talk the average highway patrolman out of giving her a ticket by arguing she’d left her license at home: Officer, sir, I’m rushing my baby sister home to our momma cause her fever’s just scorching my hand, poor little dumpling. My job was usually looking doleful. (I’ve mentioned before that when my big sister pens her memoir, I will always appear either throwing up or wetting my pants or sobbing.)
However personal such stories are at my core, they’ve somehow ceased to be my business, since I’m no longer—after ten years—the person who wrote Liars’ Club. To promote a book so long after it’s in print makes you—according to novelist Ian McEwan—an employee of your former self. Other than reading the occasional excerpt on request, I haven’t cracked the book’s spine since I recorded the audio, have no desire to do so.
I do, however, continue to receive from it the shiniest of gems: readers who get it. As I’m signing books after a lecture, somebody always stays till the end to pull me aside, and while the auditorium is being swept out around us, I hear a stranger’s unlikely family saga. I’m chosen
for such a confidence because people think I’ll empathize, and it’s not hyperbolic to claim I always do.
But I’d set out on the road the first time with soul-sucking dread, fearing that the people I loved most in the world would be bantered about as grotesques, myself pitied as some Dickensian orphan. The opposite happened. In towns across the country, readers of every class and stripe confided about childhoods that certainly differed from mine in terms of surface pyrotechnics—fires set and fortunes squandered. But the feelings were identical. As I went from town to town, I felt a community assembling around me.
Even the most perfect-looking clan sailed through a rough patch. “I’m from one of those Donna Reed households you always wanted to adopt you,” the elegant woman in Chicago said. But her doctor daddy got saddled with a wicked malpractice suit. A few more martinis than usual got poured from the silver shaker every night. Rumor was he took up with his nurse.
What happened? I was riveted.
“We worked it out,” she said. “It passed.” But not before his Cadillac plowed over her bicycle one drunken night and her mother threatened divorce. Like me, she’d lain awake and felt the metaphorical foundations of her family shake as her parents roared around in the masks of monsters.
Not everybody I met reported such chaotic times as mere blips in the family timeline. One guy’s drug dealer parents dragged him across many borders with bags of heroin taped under his Dr. Denton’s. Another woman had, at age five, watched her alcoholic mother hang herself while the girl fought to shield her toddler brother’s eyes.
These stories exploded the myth that such turbulent family dramas condemn you to a life curled up in the back ward of a mental institution. Most of these folks seemed—on the surface at least—to have gotten over their troubled upbringings without blocking them out.
The female therapist in a Portland bookstore talked specifically about the power of narrative in her life. She’d been raised by a chronic schizophrenic, her school clothes selected by God himself instructing her mom from the radio. The girl got adept (as I had) at worming her way into other people’s houses. In college she fought depression with therapy. At fifty, she wore a Burberry raincoat and was happily married with grown kids. Plus she was in close touch with her own mother, whose mood swings had gotten better with new medications and the lessening of stress that old age brought.