God, I loved this book. There are actually very few books I read that I end up disliking, you’ll find, but that’s because I take a lot of care in choosing them. This is another one I hijacked from my mom’s bureau, and I can’t say I regret it (she has some really terrible ones on there...like 5 Jodi Picoult books. So clearly, borrowing a “good book” from her is always a gamble). I actually forced myself to stop reading every few chapters or so because I wanted to prolong the characters’ life spans -- and I never put down a book I’m enjoying if I can help it.
Mary Karr’s beautifully written memoir is the kind that stays with you long after you finish it. The facts of her childhood are memorable enough (grew up in the 1960’s in a miserable, barren town in East Texas; her mother had psychotic episodes; she was molested at a heart-sickeningly young age; the list goes on and on…) but her writing style is what truly makes The Liar’s Club a standout from other memoirs. Karr is, by profession, a poet – a fact that is evident in her stark yet languid prose. She tells the story mostly from her viewpoint as a 7 and then 8-year old child, a girl who was as apt to enact revenge on a neighborhood boy by sniper-ing his family with her BB-gun, as she was to winning the school spelling bee or skipping two grades. As the heroine, Mary Marlene practically leaps off the page. She's a child with a bad temper who's isolated because of her family's eccentricity, and learns from an early age how to avenge herself in a world that is, more often than not, unusually cruel.
There isn’t much I can give away in terms of plot – it’s pretty much a given. Like all memoirs, The Liars Club offers a glimpse into what life was like for a certain person as they grew up. Karr’s childhood wasn’t as grossly bizarre as Augusten Burroughs’ (chronicled in Running With Scissors), but she often depicts seriously sad situations with the same blend of pathos and humor. The Liar’s Club put me in mind of Jeannette Wells’ The Glass Castle, in that in both women were no doubt loved very much in their childhoods, but they were still victims of well-intentioned but not entirely stable parents.
I highly recommend The Liar’s Club. It is one of the few books I’ve read in a while that has the ability to make me laugh out loud over a single sentence before bringing me to tears in the following paragraph. Karr has created something truly unique in retelling her experiences as a young, confused, fiery child – a girl who grew up to create beauty out of something so seemingly dark and miserable.
