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There is no story without memory. What is a memory without feeling? Next time you walk the essay labyrinth, put galore thought into how you will concede your story to take shape and become a piece that captures your mother’s reputation and spirit. Think regarding what you need to fetch into the story so that it will hold it is shape and compel not just reading but connection. One way to start out your traveling is to realize that you will get started to build your essay with memories of signification to place as the foundation of your story. The specific idea behind each memory may be thought of as a building block or brick, and what holds those bricks together is the mortar. From my point of view, the mortar of a story amounts to expressing the sensations emanating from the memories you’ve chosen. Accessing your unfeigned sensations and emotions and weaving them all around will convey a solid connection amidst the memories and the people behind the memories. Your sensations accurately and candidly set down on paper will connect one brick to the next for a secure foundation. Of course this makes perfective sense, but it’s not totally any easy task to get the mortar to set-up just right. With a memory of substance in mind, start out your walk through the essay labyrinth. Hold on to that memory while distancing yourself from it emotionally. Look at what your mother is doing in the peculiar memory, but now don’t attach your sensations to the image. For example, perchance you see your mother at the sewing machine finishing up a Halloween costume. She’s guiding fuzzy pink fabric through the zipper foot. Pins askew as they hold the zipper to the thick fabric as the thread binds them together one quick mechanical stitch at a time. Her fingers come within a hair’s width of the needle on the skinny side of the zipper foot as the machine whirs and pulses speedily up and down. Without emotion attached to this effigy it becomes just a picture of a woman sewing, and someone looking on probably wouldn’t think twice in regards to this picture of domesticity. But you feel something regarding this memory. In fact, you feel deeply regarding the incident. So let’s move on. In the next couple frames, you see your mother’s body snap back and tense up as her index finger is poked clean through by that sharp sewing machine needle. You turn away from her and run into your bedroom. There’s a smile on your face as you look into the mirror above your dresser. Now this picture might change things a bit for the onlooker, but not sufficient to make a good story out of it unless you want to come clean and tell the reader the whole truth regarding what you were feeling. You have come to the center of the labyrinth without emotion, but as you take steps out the other side, turn on your feelings, mix the mortar as you prepare to tell your story. What value does a memory have without feelings? A story is not worth telling without expressing your sensations frankly and with numerous conflict or convergence. This story could be told when it comes to the dangers of sewing, but really, who would care? However, this memory kept significance for you, so tell us when it comes to it. Make us care. Let us in on the emotion you were sentiment as you watched your mother invent that Halloween costume for your step-sister, but said she didn’t have time to make one for you. Tell us in regards to the pain and the hurt behind that smile on your face as you tore from the sewing room. Tell us why you felt guilty for your glee in spotting the drops of blood on the costume, and why you wished you were not you, but another girl instead. A girl whom Mother loved sufficient to bleed for. Now you’ve got a story. Most helpful customer reviews 141 of 149 people found the following review helpful. The book starts with a mystery: Why are police being called to the scene of a young girl’s bed? Why is a kindly doctor inspecting her body for “marks?” The books builds a mystery, then takes more than 150 pages bothering to solve it, but by that time you are hooked too deep into the rest of the story to care. You want to find out how the most screwed up family ever to reside in the Lone Star State managed to survive themselves, albeit barely.
While the author is a recognized poet and esteemed college professor, and “The Liars’ Club” is widely praised among literary critics, those fearing some pointy-headed exercise in literati snobbery at the expense of slack-jawed Western yokels need not fear. Not that Karr doesn’t get in some digs at the rustic Bible-thumpers responsible for so much of her upbringing, but her style of writing is much more akin to Stephen King than Margaret Mead, writing in a real-world way about actual experiences she underwent in a way that will make you feel you underwent them to, whatever your age, sex, or social background. She describes everything from hurricanes to rapes to a child’s first gulp of sparkling alcohol with a “you-are-there” veracity that is almost frightening, and hard to pull away from. Only James Ellroy’s “My Dark Places” and Mikal Gilmore’s “Shot Through The Heart” hold a candle to this in my experience, and I’ve read a few.
The cruelest thing one has to report about this book is, however savage the author’s experience, it never stops being so goddam funny. With an eye for detail like Dickens crossed with a sense of humor as constant as Twain’s, Karr makes “The Liar’s Club” the kind of book one can’t just put down at the end of a chapter, however sleepy or battered by second-hand reality the reader might feel.
On telling about her grandmother’s slow death from cancer, Karr is nothing if not succinct. “First they took off her toenail, then her toe, then her foot. Then they shot mustard gas through her leg till it was burnt black, then she screamed for six weeks nonstop. Then they took off her leg, and it was like a black stump laid on the pillow…”
So much for pathos, as she continues: “At the end of this report, [Karr's sister] Lecia and I would start scanning around whoever’s kitchen it was for cookies or Kool-Aid. We knew with certain instinct that reporting on a dead grandma deserved some payoff.”
She explains later that she wasn’t so sorry to lose Grannie. The woman used a quirt on her hide and distended her mother’s psyche to the point of breakdown. Though it’s hard to say exactly. Karr doesn’t give away much, but she offers this counterbalance to her tale of Grandma’s ordeal: “Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.”
Anyone who’s lost someone to cancer knows intimately what that means, and that’s the heartbreak and the greatness of “The Liars’ Club,” a book that seems so amazingly knowing as it recounts Karr’s firsthand experiences as a young girl. Her experiences are raw and miserable, to put it mildly, but she presents it in such a way to make it utterly compelling to the reader, yet endurable, too.
The book works on so many levels. I was left wondering about sister Lucia, a rock-steady character who often protects her younger sister, but whom Karr nevertheless savages throughout her narrative. Is she writing here as an adult, or channeling her younger self and some form of sibling rivalry? I also wondered about the title organization, a group of men with whom her father hangs out and tells tall tales. Whenever she describes a meeting, she slips from the past into the present tense for one of the few moments in the book. Is that a signal that the Liars’ Club interludes are themselves tall tales by author Karr? Or is she telescoping her experience in those close quarters to give it the special verisimilitude that makes her relationship with her father so central to the story?
In one of these interludes, Karr ponders the nature of lying and how they reveal deeper secrets of the liar, that is to say, “how lies can tell you the truth.” Certainly there’s no earthly way of explaining her mother, an earthy Bohemian who takes to painting and drinking with equal fervor, feuding with her husband and taking advantage of a sudden inheritance Gloria Swanson-style. Any divorced father will find himself welling up with tears as he reads Karr’s account of how he was separated and then reunited with his daughters.
There’s nothing easy in this book, but so much to love. Everything good you’ve heard about this book is true. Now just go read it. 45 of 47 people found the following review helpful. 82 of 90 people found the following review helpful. The Liar’s Club may fit that description, but don’t be put off, because it’s absolutely fantastic. Mary Karr’s writing routinely verges on prose-poetry and is, despite its dark subject matter, funny enough to make you laugh out loud. Then, once you’re laughing, she turns around and hits you with something so brutal that you’re caught up short.
I did find myself wondering, as I’m sure others have, whether some embroidery may have been involved in the author’s crystal-clear recollections of events long past. She appears to have kept copious journals, but still, you wonder how anyone could have gotten so much detail down with such precision, especially as a child.
Then again, maybe she’s a hyper-sensitive person with a photographic memory. Ultimately I didn’t care if parts of it were embellished a bit. She’s such a good writer that if this depiction of events captures the truth of her childhood, more power to her. My main reaction was a weirdly worshipful desire to locate Ms. Karr and make her tell me more stories, the ones that didn’t make it into this book. (Actually, I’d be surprised if this has not happened to her.)
This book pulls you in. It’s funny, poignant, shocking, memorable. I give it five richly deserved stars. The Liars Club A Memoir Photo The Liars Club A Memoir Picture The Liars Club A Memoir Photo The Liars Club A Memoir Image The Liars Club A Memoir Pic The Liars Club A Memoir Pic |
The Best Memoir You Will Ever Read
