BOOK: The Liar's Club - Mary Karr (1995)

The Liar's Club - Mary Karr

I remember clearly when this book came out and it was flying off the shelves.  This is exactly why I didn't read it until a couple of weeks ago.  For most of my life I have had this stupid and immediate disapproval of anything popular that I didn't discover early.  I always suspect mass manipulation and I do not want to be a part of the herd.  The irony is that it didn't matter to me if I happened to be the lead cow, but, by god, I would not be following along with no independent judgement, no ability to opt out of what was all the rage.

This spared me such works as The Bridges of Madison County and The Celestine Prophecy, for example, neither of which I will link to at Amazon.  But it also cost me for missing such works as this one or the Joan Didion book that currently sits on my nightstand.  You probably know Emerson's foolish consistency line from his essays.  Well, my small mind has plenty of hobgoblins and I am trying to get rid of them.

After I complete a book like this, I always read the reviews that feel the opposite of my own.  So, for this, I read all the negative reviews at Amazon.  I do this to see how my mind and taste compares with others.  Many reviews, for or against a work, are poorly reasoned, poorly explained takes that wouldn't pass muster in a third grade book report.  But there are others that are well written and considered, respectful views of the book.  These reviews are valuable learning tools.

Because this book is so well-known and so reviewed (I might be one of the last people to have read it who is older than 40) I will comment on what people have generally viewed as weaknesses.

The most common complaints are how Mary Karr has such vivid memories and the incredible insight of her primary grade self.  I link these two together because they are linked...tautologies are a specialty of mine.  Seriously, Ms. Karr wrote this as an adult.  Her mnemonic powers are good.  She is a writer, a poet.  We do not know how she makes her way back into her past, but I know how I do it.  I know that I can work myself into a reverie and remember very specific details.  I can hear the creak of a swing, feel temperature changes and breezes, smell the "granny gravy" simmering in a cast iron skillet in the kitchen, taste the smoke in the air from my grandfather's cigarettes, feel the heat and solidity of my grandmother's legs in what I know now to be caused by elephantiasis.

And that last point is the link to her insight.  As an eight year old, I only knew that my grandmothers legs from the knee down to her toes were abnormally huge, her right leg being about a third again the size of her left, both being at least three times the size of a normal leg.  I knew that sometimes the skin on the larger leg would crack and bleed, that both legs could swell and burn as if she had a fever centered there.  My grandmother only complained about them when that "acted up" yet they kept her from walking normally or ever wearing pants.  Now, as an adult with life experience, I can determine that she had elephantiasis, a word I would be unlikely to pronounce if encountered in print and would likely giggle about if told my grandmother had it.

But, if I am writing a memoir, I am going to call it what it is as I know it today.  Readers who would attach that intelligence to the eight year old me are missing the point.  I think it speaks well of Mary Karr's writing ability that people confuse her adult insight into her childhood memories.  She has convinced the reader of time and place so accurately, so deftly, that they are jarred by her adult self's intellectual intrusion.

Mary Karr has said that she made up the discussions of the Liar's Club, the actual group of her father's friends.  This is an admission that she was too young to remember the adult conversation.  So, she uses her adult powers to re-imagine the words so that she doesn't break the scenes.  These are important scenes about her father, about his milieu and her place in it.  The details of the story are not relevant and to call attention to them by focusing on her lack of memory of them would ruin our viewing of these men and their hierarchy.

Then there are the complaints related to structure.  Readers get frustrated that they can't lay out a narrative timeline of Ms. Karr's childhood except in the broadest sense: some time in Texas, some time in Colorado, and then some time back in Texas.  (I think Ms. Karr gets her hurricanes mixed up, too, but so what?)  But this is memoir, not autobiography.  Mary Karr is giving us episodes and feelings and character.  She doesn't have to lay out the months and years and tell the story chronologically.  She puts the structure in where necessary to explain motivations and behaviors.  (And if you want to complain that she couldn't possibly know the motivations of the adults in her life when she was a ten year old, go back and reread my earlier point.)

Perhaps the worst sorts of complaints about the book are those dealing with the two sexual episodes.  Many people feel that these were glossed over.  Then there were others that found them prurient and titillating, as if they were included only to sell more books.  I found them to be complete, dispassionate retellings, taking up less than three pages of the entire work.  Clearly the first violation angered her deeply.  The second, while described in more detail, felt as if she believed that she had to explain how something like that could happen, as if she was concerned that we would think she was somehow culpable.  I found the actions described obviously reprehensible, but the descriptions themselves striking the perfect note of storytelling and impact, which is what memoir should be.  Complaints about these reflect far more on the complainer than the writer, and I do not have the psychological wherewithal to explain those reflections.

Then there are the folks that want to read a memoir of childhood that is full of innocence and sugar and sunlight.  Those folks have never driven on any road southeast of Houston is my guess.  These folks have never had, or they have been meticulously shielded from, or they have psychically buried, anything negative in their youth.  Maybe, but not likely.  Look, Mary Karr probably feels like most days her childhood was fun.  What we see as incredible difficulty, she and her sister took for granted as part of living.  They knew their mother drank.  Trying to get food or candy from other households was just something you did.  Getting into fights happens.  Listening to their parents argue was the way things were.  Writing about the routine, the daily grind of childhood, playing and schooling and watching television and such would make for a boring memoir.  In fact, the memoir lags when she goes off on these tangents.

We're looking for episodes of interest when we read memoirs.  The car on the Orange Bridge, grandma's leg (hers, not mine), the trip to the beach, the two near deaths of Hector (poor guy was really used for two significant turning points in the life of the Karr family and then discarded to history) and a hurricane are examples of what we want to read about.  Conflict makes life interesting.  Conflict leads to growth, especially when the outcome isn't so great.

That's what makes this a great and entertaining book.  It took a couple of decades I guess for the family to finally figure out a few things.  Was it worth it?  You'd have to ask the Karrs.  I thought it was worth reading, though.