Rating: 
Summary: An excellent story-teller, a disturbing story...
Review: If it weren't for the fact that Mary Karr has seemed to have survived her horrible childhood in East Texas (with a sense of humor and ability to love intact), this book would have bordered on tragic. Not that her survival means it is any less mortifying - but sometimes it is important for people who aren't raised in such circumstances to believe that children are, in fact, resilient and that people can escape their upbringings. It was difficult to put this book down because even though her drunk mother (of many marriages) and slightly unbalanced father were unsettling - there was, it seemed to me, still a significant amount of real love for the children. Once of the other reasons to read this book is that Mary Karr is just plain and simple an excellent story-teller. In our world of sound bites and gloss-overs it is a luxury to read (listen) to the stories of the world, of real people, not the pilot's wife or the terrorist's child or the entertainer's mistress - but of people who grow up in the dangers of life wherever and however they exist.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful use of imagery and perspective.
Review: Mary Karr deftly utilizes imagery and perspective to create an interesting piece of literature. As she drifts through her memories of a dysfunctional childhood in East Texas and Colorado, Karr often paints very vivid pictures that are almost poetic, describing many situations she encountered in fine detail. These intense images allow readers to feel like they are there, living vicariously through the words. Also, the perspective adds to the imagery. Each incident is remembered very clearly, as a child can be very observant, yet the incidents are described with a poet's precision, utilizing the perfect words for each description, as only a mature and well-read adult is capable. The language constructs universality that will instantly hook and draw any reader in. I strongly recommend this book, if only to admire the skillful use of words.
Rating: 
Summary: Wow--just Wow
Review: If you don't own a copy of The Liars' Club, your collection is incomplete. This is by far the smartest, ballsiest, sassiest, best-written memoir I've read. Karr takes normal words and turns them into pure emotion and eye-opening description. Never have I come away from a book feeling as though I've lived that life, experienced those situations. This book is the exception. Karr takes us into her life growing up in Texas, the daughter of an odd set of parents and the product of too much time and too little to do with it. She tells of family tragedies and heartache so plainly, so matter-of-factly that the reader comes away with a sense of belonging to the madness that was Karr's life. What's more, deep into the book, one realizes that quite possibly, the title of the book may be revealing a private joke Karr is playing on her readers. The seed of doubt is planted, thus enhancing the story and the experience. I enjoyed this book thoroughly. It's worth a second and third read. I'm awaiting Karr's third book with the same patience as a kid on Christmas Eve.
Rating:
Summary: No Easy Answers
Review: Mary Karr's memoir, about growing-up in a desolated Texas town under the care of alcoholic parents, should be read by anyone who is planning to start a family. The Liars' Club highlights the traits of a household ruled by alcohol: the sudden maturity young children must demonstrate, the outcast status these children have to deal with in the community, and the futility they feel as parents waste their parental and vocational gifts.
Don't miss this extraordinary book. Mary Karr is a professor at Syracuse University, and a poet. No wonder, all characters feel real and are not a collection of tics and eccentricities which populate many current books. Her economical use of metaphors and similes keeps this memoir free of platitudes masquerading as life lessons. When the metaphors come they mean something. Mary Karr and her older sister are not portrayed as saintly or innocent: They are precocious, stubborn, and cynical. When parents are unavailable, when children are forced to become de-facto parents, when the same children are repeatedly submitted to beatings and other punitive actions for no apparent reason, a skeptical soul may be the only road to adulthood.
Rating:
Summary: The apples don't fall far from the tree
Review: Just like Pete Karr once entertained the Liars' Club with his stories, now Mary Karr has written a memoir full of stories for us- stories told in such a conversational tone that at times you'll feel like she's in the same room. She is a wonderful storyteller who no doubt inherited her talent from her father, and further developed it listening to the tales he told for his friends. In recounting events from her troubled childhood, did she stretch, alter, or exaggerate the truth? Even (oh no!) LIE? Perhaps. I know that as I was reading, I found myself wondering how she could possibly remember events from so long ago in such vivid detail. But I suppose the book is called "The Liars' Club" for a reason. And don't lies and the truth sometimes get mixed together, like a "smudge on a school blackboard"? If I have one complaint about the book, it's that there's such a huge gap between the second and third parts that I was left wondering what happened during those missing years. There were hints of drug and alcohol use . . . but I want more details! How, in spite of being raised in the dysfunctional family that we came to know in The Liars' Club (or was it precisely BECAUSE of this environment?) did she get the strength to pursue her literary ambitions and become so successful? I want to know! Perhaps she addressed these issues in Cherry. It's next on my list.
Rating:
Summary: Funny writing, down-to-earth style
Review: I thought I was sick of daughters-with-crazy-mothers (often from the South) books, but this one sucked me in with its wit and candor. It's hard to stop and feel any sympathy for the narrator because you're laughing so hard. Definitely a great summer beach read. Other good crazy-mother books: Sights Unseen, An Egg on Three Sticks, Blackbird.
Rating: 
Summary: Disturbing Fiction
Review: This book is fiction, not a memoir. The author writes that her mother was in a hurry to marry her Dad because she was already 30. By the time Mary's older sister is 9, Mary's grandmother moves in with the family. Mary Karr writes: "It must be terrible to have cancer at age 50". So, the grandmother was 50 at the time and the mother was (at least) 30+9+9 months = 40 years old? I don't think so! I liked the way Mary Karr tells the story - for a while. I really enjoyed the tall tales her father made up in the first third or so of the book. After the second sexual abuse scene, however, I had thoroughly enough of the despicable characters. No need reading somebody else's nightmares stated as a fact.
Rating: 
Summary: Liars' Club Review
Review: This book was all but interesting to read. I had such a difficult time finishing this book, which was for class. I found myself skipping over paragraphs many times and not missing a thing. I had to make myself finish this book. This is one of the most boring, poorly written, and un-interesting books I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Memoir You Will Ever Read
Review: Mary Karr had to go through hell so you could read a very cool book. That's one way to look at this opus, an exploration of the author's East Texas girlhood and the collapsing family situation she found herself confronted with. 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.
Rating:
Summary: Southern re-fried chicken
Review: Karr has a gift for the sort of "colorful" Southern writing Yankees can't seem to get enough of. But this book is a warmed-over rehash of the truly great Southern writers. Go read the good stuff instead, folks. Or maybe your "book club" could read this one so it won't tax your brain so much.
|
