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Overview
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
Synopsis
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.
Michiko Kakutani
Ms. Karr has written an astonishing book. -- New York Times
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewMay 1997
The Liars' Club was published in 1995 to rave reviews and quickly raced its way to the top of the bestseller list in 1996 with the paperback release. James Atlas has called the memoir "a classic of American literature" and notes, "Tending her postage stamp of reality, as Faulkner advised, Mary Karr conjures the simmering heat and bottled rage of life in a small Texas oil town with an intensity that gains power from its verisimilitude — from the fact that it's fact."
Karr's is an unsentimental recollection of an anguished childhood, rank with memories of rape and riddled by the emotional and actual bullets of her parents' brutal conflicts. Against the mosquito-infested backdrop of a small East Texas town, Karr employs humor rather than anger as she unravels the secrets that propel the destruction of her alcoholic father and crazy mother.
This is a painful story of a family reeling from want of love, remembered and told with compassion. This memoir's success is a testament to the appeal and caliber of Karr's writing. The Liars' Club was a National Book Circle Award Finalist and a PEN Nonfiction Award nominee and was selected as one of the best books of 1995 by People, Time, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly.