The Liars' Club

The Liars’ Club is a memoir by Mary Karr and was first published in 1995. It won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for nonfiction and was a New York Times bestseller.

The subject of the memoir is Karr’s turbulent childhood. Karr and her older sister Lecia grew up in Leechfield, Texas and lived briefly in Colorado. Their father was a World War II veteran who worked at an oil refinery and came from a modest Texan background. Their mother also came from a modest Texan background, but later inherited a significant amount of money when oil was found on her mother’s land after her death. Karr’s parents had a volatile marriage, to the point of divorcing and then remarrying. Karr remembers her father as a taciturn but loving man, who was most expressive when telling stories during his regular “Liars’ Club” meetings with his drinking friends. While these meetings give the book its title, it is Karr’s mother who is the central subject of this book. She is portrayed as an impulsive, restless, charismatic woman who was subject, throughout Karr’s childhood, to frightening rages and compulsions. Her behavior is seen to have its roots in her own difficult childhood, a mystery which Karr gradually uncovers over the course of the memoir.

The memoir opens with the aftermath of Karr’s mother’s violent psychotic breakdown, which occurred when Karr was 7 and Lecia 9. Karr and her sister are in their house at night, with both their parents gone; Karr understands that her father is still at his job, and that her mother has been taken away in an ambulance. A doctor examines Karr for“marks that I now know weren’t even there” (10), while Lecia, outside of the house, is feigning sleep in the arms of the local sheriff. There are also a number of watching neighbors outside, and Karr understands that she and Lecia will have to stay the night with one of these neighbors. Karr states that she has no memory of which neighbor she and Lecia ended up staying with on that particular night. She also states that, while she now remembers everything that happened to her and her sister on that night, it took her much of her adult life to do so, and she is not going to tell the whole story of that night right away: “Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while” (9).

Instead, she delves into her parents’ marriage; her parents’—particularly her mother’s—family backgrounds; and her father’s regular Liars’ Club meetings, which were a kind of oasis for Karr throughout her childhood. She explains how her parents met when her mother was literally on the run from another marriage (she married seven times in all, including twice to Karr’s father) and stopped at a gas station to have a flat tire repaired. Her father happened to be working at the gas stationthat night, filling in for a friend of his. At the time of their meeting, Karr’s mother had recently returned to Texas from New York City: a place that she mythologized to Karr and Leica, even while she withheld much of the truth about what happened to her there. She was on her way home to her own mother in Lubbock.

Karr’s maternal grandmother, who later comes to stay with Karr’s family, is portrayed as a strange and frightening woman. Although she is ill with melanoma while staying with Karr’s family, she nevertheless exerts a tyrannical authority. It is her eventual death that seems to be the impetus for Karr’s mother’s psychotic breakdown, alluded to in the book’s first chapter and revealed in full in Chapter 8. Having been silently mourning her mother for months, Karr’s mother, alone in the house one evening with her daughters, goes on a frightening rampage. After throwing most of the items in the house—furniture, toys, clothes—into a bonfire on the lawn, she then comes at Karr and Lecia with a knife. She then convinces herself that she has already stabbed her children and calls the doctor on herself. She is put into an institution.

Once she is out of the institution, the Karr family moves to Colorado, an impulsive move that Karr’s mother’s inherited money finances. Karr’s mother buys a bar there, and Karr’s parents eventually divorce. Karr’s father returns to Texas and for a time drops out of Karr’s and Leica’s lives; Karr’s mother remarries a local bartender named Hector. Although Karr and Lecia feel that they must live with their mother in order to supervise her,they decide to return to Texas when Karr’s mother nearly shoots Hector one night. Karr’s mother herself returns to Texas, and to Karr’s father, not long after her daughters’ return.

Part 3 of the book takes place in Texas and jumps 17 years ahead in time. Karr is tending to her ailing father, who has recently had a stroke. While searching in the family attic for some old army documents belonging to her father, she comes across her mother’s old wedding rings. She then gradually gets her mother to tell her the whole story about what happened to her in New York City. She finds out about her mother’s youthful marriage, her move to New York with her husband and their two small children, and her husband (and mother-in-law) then disappearing with her children while she is gone one day at work. She eventually tracked her stolen family down, yet she decided against taking custody of her children. This is a decision that haunted her throughout her life, and reverberated into Karr’s own life.