From Powells.com
Mary
Karr is a poet who writes wry, punchy, blackly humorous prose. Her harrowing
childhood is brought to Technicolor life in her memoir
The Liars' Club.
A dazzling bestseller,
The Liars' Club was selected one of the best books
of 1995 by
Time,
The New Yorker, and
Entertainment Weekly
and
People. It also won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and the Texas Institute
of Letters Prize for Best Nonfiction.
The Liars' Club focuses on Karr's early years growing up in an East
Texas refinery town, the child of two larger than life parents: a mother married
seven times, twice to Karr's father, who teeters on the brink of psychosis,
and a glitteringly charming but violent father. Karr and her sister Lecia know
no other life than chaos, fights, and lies spurred by alcoholism and mental
illness, and their scrappy defiance in the face of these odds is heroic and
poignant. Karr manages to tell her story with love, wicked humor, clarity, and
a complete lack of self pity. With its pathos and color Karr has written a white-trash
Angela's Ashes making her one of America's most loved memoirists. Georgie,
Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Astonishing...one of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a backup 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
Review
"The essential American story...a beauty." Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
Review
"Overflows with sparkling wit and humor....Truth beats powerfully at the heart of this dazzling memoir." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"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
About the Author
Mary Karr's three volumes of poetry are Abacus, The Devil's Tour, and Viper Rum. Her memoir, Cherry, published in 2000, was also a New York Times bestseller. She is a Jesse Truesdale Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.