Reading Group Guide
The Liars' Club
by Mary Karr
ABOUT THE
TITLE
The Family Sideshow
When I set out on a book tour to promote the memoir
about my less than perfect Texas clan, I did so with
soul-sucking dread. Surely we'd be held up as grotesques,
my beloveds and I, real moral circus freaks. Instead I
shoved into bookstores where sometimes hundreds of people
stood claiming to identify with my story, which fact
stunned me. Maybe these people's family lives differed in
terms of surface pyrotechnics houses set fire to
and fortunes squandered. But the feelings didn't. After
eight weeks of travel, I ginned up this working
definition for a dysfunctional family: any family with
more than one person in it.
Maybe coming-of-age memoirs are being bought and read
by the boatload precisely because they offer some window
into other people's whacked-out families, with which
nearly everyone born in the fractured baby-boom era can
identify. They also guarantee a central character
emotionally engaged in a family narrative. Any writer's
voice even an omniscient, third-person narrator's
in fiction serves as a character in the text. But
in memoir, the alleged "truth" of a given voice
makes it somehow more emotionally compelling. It
announces itself as real. Because family memoir lodges us
in a writer's personal history, we can almost see the
voice being shaped by factors of geography,
socio-economics, psychology. Like a ghost that assembles
itself from mist, so the writer's self seems to appear
from her voice. Believe this, the autobiographer says,
it's real. If metafiction has been working
double-overtime to explode the lie that fiction is true,
memoir somewhat reestablishes the reader's dream.
Of course, most readers doubt the absolute veracity of
a memoir's reconstructed dialogue and so forth. Tobias
Wolff noted in a recent lecture at Syracuse University
that all memory involves imagination and vice-versa. Some
memoirs also clearly wander into the realm of the
fantastic to construct what read like family myths
Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, for
instance. There the author steals her Chinese mother's
method of "talking-story" to meld her own
somewhat conflicting Chinese and American selves.
Still, we presume that the truth's skeleton underlay
Hong Kingston's tale. So the character speaking to us
from those events also feels, in some way, like a more
real escort through the drama than a fictional
narrator's. However "real" Ishmael may seem in Moby
Dick, Mary McCarthy offers me as a reader what feels
like greater intimacy with a living character in Memories
of a Catholic Girlhood.
Don't get me wrong. Greater intimacy with a narrator
isn't always what a reader wants: I haven't given up
reading novels. But in the cocooned isolation we occupy
at this millennium's end, a friendly voice on a page has
value.
A child's voice or perspective can also open the often
firmly locked door to a reader's own memories of youth.
When I read in Harry Crews's A Childhood how that
backwoods Georgia boy made up stories about models in the
Sears catalog, I identified with it wholesale, even
though I grew up far from the savage poverty Crews lays
out:
"Nearly everybody I knew had something
missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an eye
clouded with blindness from a glancing fence
staple.... I knew that under those [Sears models']
fancy clothes, there had to be swellings and boils of
one kind or another because there was no other way to
live in the world."
Anybody would twig to some universal truth about the
childhood Crews describes here, I think. We all lose our
innocence in part by coming to marvel at the rift between
one's private life family fights, say and
the glossy families sold by the media. Crews's voice
conjures that innocence for us, the time when a family
universe was still so colossal that you could project
that reality onto the lives of strangers. Crews's private
experience ultimately overrode the lie of the Sears
catalog. The stories he made up with his friend gave him,
he later wrote, "an overwhelming sense of well-being
and profound power."
Crews's survival is also encouraging, a testimony of
sorts. In a class on memoir I taught at Syracuse
University last year, my students puzzled me at the
term's end by praising the genre's sense of hope. Of the
dark and dire stories we'd read mental
institutions for Susanna Kaysen and rape for Maya Angelou
hope didn't seem the leading emotion (except
perhaps in Henry Louis Gates's Colored People).
"They lived to write books," one student said.
"They grew up and got away from their parents,"
said another. The fact that the writers outlived their
troubled pasts, walked out of them into adulthood,
ultimately served as empowering for that class of
readers.
Not everyone's so wowed by what memoir offers up.
William Gass took a hard swipe at the whole genre in Harper's
last May ("Autobiography in the Age of
Narcissism") primarily scolding the genre's lack of
truth. "The autobiographer is likely to treat
records with less respect than he should....
Autobiographers flush before examining their
stools."
For "truth" Gass favors history without
bothering to note as Tobias Wolff did in the
aforementioned lecture that historians are no more
neutral toward their subjects than memoirists are. Nor
can such primary sources as letters and diaries be
construed as "objective." Gass also neglected
history's glaring failures. My high school history text
cheerfully described the westward migration without a
glance at the native peoples whose bones got plowed under
in the process.
Gass also praised fiction for veracity because it
doesn't announce itself as true. I could borrow that same
reasoning to defend memoir for its blatant subjectivity.
In our time we've watched most great sources of
"objective" truth churches and
scientific studies and presidents among them
topple in terms of their moral authority. So any pose of
authority can seem the ultimate fakery. In this way,
Michael Herr's psychedelic memoir of Vietnam, Dispatches,
seems way more authentic to me in describing that war
than the Defense Department's records
"objectively" assembled under Robert McNamara.
In our loneliness for some sense that we're behaving
well inside our very isolated families, personal
experience has assumed some new power. Just as the novel
form once took up experiences of urban, industrialized
society that weren't being handled in epic poems or
epistles, so memoir reliant on a single, intensely
personal voice for its unifying glue wrestles
subjects in a way that readers of late find compelling.
The good ones I've read confirm my experience in a flawed
family. They reassure me the way belonging to a community
reassures you.
My bookstore chats did the same. On the road, I came
to believe despite the dire edicts from Newt
Gingrich and the media about the moral, drug-besotted
quagmire into which we've all sunk that our
families are working, albeit in new forms. People have
gone on birthing babies and burying their dead and loving
those with whom they shared troubled patches of history.
We do this partly by telling stories fictional and
non-fictional ones in voices that neither deny
family struggles nor make demons of our beloveds.
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Mary Karr grew up near Port Arthur, Texas.
She has won Pushcart Prizes for both her poetry and her
essays, and her work appears in such magazines as Granta,
Parnassus, Vogue, Esquire, Poetry,
The New Yorker, and The American Poetry Review.
Her two volumes of poetry are The Devil's Tour and
Abacus. She has been awarded grants from the NEA,
the Whiting Foundation, the Bunting Institute at
Radcliffe, and others. Karr has been featured in numerous
publications, including The New York Times Magazine,
Harper's Bazaar, and Mirabella.
The Liars' Club, which has appeared on
bestseller lists across the country, is the winner of the
PEN/Martha Albrand Award and the Texas Institute of
Letters Prize for Best Nonfiction. It was named a
finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and
selected as an American Library Association Notable Book.
The Liars' Club was chosen as one of the best
books of 1995 by People, Time, The
New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly. Karr,
who has worked as a Fellow at the Harvard Business School
and as a crawfish trucker in Texas, currently teaches
literature and creative writing at Syracuse University.
She lives in upstate New York with her son.
AUTHOR
INTERVIEW
Q: In the introduction to this piece
you say that any family with more than one person is
dysfunctional. Why do you feel this way?
A: If dysfunction means that a family
doesn't work, then every family ambles into some arena in
which that happens, where relationships get strained or
even break down entirely. We fail each other or
disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings,
kids, marriage partners the whole enchilada.
Obviously, these failures cover a spectrum. The parent
who beats a kid insensibly on a regular basis registers
differently on the disappointment-meter from the one who
doesn't deliver a pony for Christmas. Probably the vast
majority of families fall between these two poles.
Nevertheless, I believe that every tribe has to
accommodate a wide range of behavior from its members.
Illness and death, which we're taught in this country to
view as aberrant, actually afflict us all. Depression
hits everybody from time to time. The current figures on
alcoholism vary, but I heard a lecture once where someone
claimed that five percent of the population consumes
ninety percent of the liquor sold. You can bet that
segment of the population causes considerable strain on
those near and dear. When people suffer their
relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all
suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature of
being human and wanting stuff we don't always get.
Q: You also talk about the popularity
of memoirs about dysfunctional families in post-baby-boom
America. Is dysfunction a particularly American
phenomenon? Or is interest in reading about it?
A: Probably readers' intense interest
in scaldingly tough family lives is an American
phenomenon, but I'm no expert. The only other country
I've ever lived in is England, where I encountered much
sneering about our narcissistic interest in therapies,
self-help, twelve-step recovery, etcet. Still, their
rates of divorce and alcoholism are up like ours. Their
families have probably endured the same upheavals in
structure. The Liars' Club has done well over
there, and my British publisher described the same boom
in memoir over there that we've seen here.
The fact that America's so geographically vast adds a
factor the Brits don't have how far-flung we are
from our beloveds, who traditionally helped us with an
occasional bag of groceries or an afternoon of
babysitting.
Q: What memoirs that you've read have
inspired you the most? Did any of them influence the way
you conceived your own?
A: The memoirs I adore were all
stolen from shamelessly. As a junior in high school, I
read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
That she wrote about a rural, Southern, working-class
family was a revelation to me. The peasants in Tolstoy
were one thing, but Angelou showed me literature's
characters didn't have to be limited to the ruling
classes, with which I had virtually no truck. The same
held true for Harry Crews's Childhood: Biography of a
Place. Plus Crews drew more heavily on the vernacular
than Angelou did. Maxine Hong Kingston showed me in Woman
Warrior that you could write about feminist issues
without either being didactic or painting yourself as
some slobbering victim. In my early twenties I had the
great privilege of meeting both Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff
at Goddard College where I went to grad school. Their
books The Duke of Deception and This
Boy's Life, respectively showed me the virtues
of humor. Plus their very different prose styles and that
of other master writers Frank Conroy, for
instance, in Stop-time (available from Penguin)
showed me that memoir's an art, even if
historically an outsider's art. There's no reason it
can't be as well written as fiction, even if structurally
it's more episodic.
Other memoirs I'm passionate enough about to have
taught include Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic
Girlhood, George Orwell on Burma and his Homage to
Catalonia, St. Augustine's Confessions,
Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, G.
H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology, John Edgar
Wideman's Brothers and Keepers, Michael Herr's Dispatches
about Vietnam, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted,
Henry Louis Gates's Colored People, and Robert
Graves's Goodbye to All That.
Q: Where did you get your
storytelling ability and how did you develop it?
A: The idiom in this book is my
daddy's mostly, the densely poetic idiom I grew up with
in East Texas. To say "it's raining like a cow
pissing on a flat rock" is to utter a line of
poetry. The phrase is metaphorical. It's physically
accurate in evoking the kind of head-bashing
thunderstorms you get from the Gulf. Plus it works at the
bounds of social propriety, which is where writers often
go to find difficult truths that haven't been written to
death already. It also grows out of a milieu that's
seldom written about one in which cows piss on
flat rocks and people stand around to marvel at it.
Q: How does your work as a poet enter
into your prose writing? Did it influence The Liars'
Club?
A: Poetry started as an oral art. So
I always listened to stories, and my work as a poet makes
me migrate to metaphor, trying to learn the truth about
one thing by looking at something like it. As a poet,
I've also tried to cultivate a precision of language that
would probably help anybody write anything better. In
Ezra Pound's Cantos there's a Chinese idiom that
he favors a single ray of sunlight coming like a
lance to rest at an exact place in an honest man's heart.
Pound likened this to Dante's notion of verbum perfecium,
the word made perfect. That's a lofty goal, but poetry
urges you toward it.
Poetry also makes one a compulsive reviser. I can do
as many as sixty drafts trying to feel my way into
whatever's interesting or true in a poem. My editing
style is to slash and burn. That helped, but I also had
to severely limit myself to three drafts of each chapter;
otherwise, it would have taken twenty years to write this
book instead of two and a half. Viking would never have
paid me, and I needed the money. Bad.
Q: In The Liars' Club you
describe several years of your childhood and then shoot
forward seventeen years to recount your father's death.
Why did you choose to structure your story the way you
did?
A: The mystery I set up at the start
of the book had that shape by my measure: Why did my
mother have the psychotic episode that started the book?
What fueled her on the wild tear I described in those
first two sections? I hoped the reader wanted to know the
answer to that question, so I didn't want to drag him or
her kicking and screaming through every meal I ate my
entire life to reach the point where her secret was
unearthed. While I was writing, I worried my editor about
how I'd pole vault through history for seventeen years.
Then I hit on it: "Seventeen years later..." We
do that all the time telling stories to each other and
permit the loss of time, so why not in print. Plus that
loss of seventeen years gave me another passel of books
to write, I hope.
Q: What advice would you give to
someone who would like to write a memoir?
A: Tobias Wolff wrote me a brilliant
letter while I was at Radcliffe College trying to start
this book. "Take no care for your dignity," he
said. "Don't be afraid of appearing angry,
small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating,
or anything else." He also warned me against the
kind of stultifying, moralizing didacticism that plagues
all bad writing. "Don't approach your history as
something to be shaken for its cautionary fruits. Tell
your stories, and your story will be revealed." I
kept that taped above my computer while I worked along
with the poem by Zbigniew Herbert translated from the
Polish that I quote at the start of the book's third
section. They were the mojos I held up against the
literary bullshit to which I'm prone.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I initially sold The Liars'
Club as a Stop-time for girls, but I never got
past that one childhood drama into the drama of puberty,
which is the swamp into which I've currently waded. So
I'm working on a sequel that details my somewhat
itinerant adolescence.
PRAISE
"The Liars' Club is a classic of American
literature.... Mary Karr conjures the simmering heat and
bottled rage of life in a small Texas oil town with an
intensity that gains power from the fact that it's
fact." James Atlas, The New York Times
Magazine
"An astonishing book.... Her most powerful tool
is her language, which she wields with the virtuosity of
both a lyric poet and an earthy, down-home Texan.... One
of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in
years." Michiko Kakutani, The New York
Times
"This book is so good I thought about sending it
out for a back-up opinion.... It's like finding Beethoven
in Hoboken. To have a poet's precision of language and a
poet's gift for understanding emotion and a poet's
insight into people applied to one of the roughest,
toughest, ugliest places in America is an astounding
event." Molly Ivins, The Nation
"A triumphant achievement in the art of memoir
and the art of living.... Karr fills her turbulent pages
with a prose as pungent and zesty as a Gulf Coast
gumbo." Newsday
"Crackles with energy and wit...a wild and wooly
contribution to the annals of American childhood."
The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Her literary instincts are extraordinary....
Karr has the poet's gift for finding something huge and
unsayable in a single image...gothic wit and stunning
clarity of memory." The Boston Globe
"The essential American story.... The Liars'
Club is a beauty." Jonathan Yardley, The
Washington Post Book World
DISCUSSION
QUESTIONS
- A major theme running through The Liars' Club
is the difference between Mary Karr's parents.
"With Mother," Karr writes, "I
always felt on the edge of something new,
something never before seen or read about or
bought, something that would change us.... With
Daddy and his friends, I always knew what would
happen and that left me feeling a sort of dreamy
safety." Karr's mother is artistic and
glamorous, while her father is down-to-earth. How
do these contrasts lay the foundation for the
Karr's family life? Did you empathize with one
parent more than the other? Did your feelings
change as the book went on and more was revealed
about them?
- Despite the horror that permeated Karr's
childhood, characteristics like humor, honesty,
and courage pervade The Liars' Club. Karr
does not pass judgment on her family or tell us
how she thought they should have behaved. Would
you have liked to have known more about Karr's
feelings about the events that she recounts? In
what instances? Or were you able to discern how
she felt through her actions? What emotions did
you experience while reading The Liars' Club?
- Karr is a character in her own book, as well as
its author. On the page, she's a tough, scrappy
kid who also has a tremendous sensitivity and
devotion to the people around her. As readers, we
understand the interior joys and terrors that
make her such a rich and vivid character. How do
you think she seemed to the people around her? If
her mother was to make a list of her strongest
characteristics, what would they be? If her
father made such a list, would it differ in any
way?
- Karr tells her story for the most part from the
point of view of a child, and what a child sees
and understands. How might the story and
Karr's perceptions change if she had told
it from the point of view of an adult, with the
benefit of everything she has come to understand
about her upbringing and her family? What would
be gained, and what would be lost?
- The author's mother, Charlie Marie, never fully
realized her dreams of becoming an artist. The
author, who as child began to write poetry, was
able to realize her creative ambitions. What gave
Karr the strength to pursue that ambition? Was it
"sheer cussedness," one of the traits
that characterized her as a child? Do you think
the sadness of her mother's unfulfilled dreams
somehow propelled her? Do you think it had
anything to do with her relationship with her
father?
- How would you characterize Karr's relationship
with her sister, Lecia? Does it change as the
book progresses?
- After Karr's grandmother dies she sings,
"Ding dong the witch is dead." Were you
surprised that she was happy her grandmother
passed away? What in the grandmother's character
was so oppressive? Do you think her grandmother
contributed to her mother's despair and
alcoholism? How important a part did she play in
Karr's life?
- In a recent interview Karr said that she had
previously tried to write a novel based on her
childhood experiences: "When I tried to
write about my life in a novel, I discovered that
I behaved better in fiction than I did in real
life. The truth is that I found it easier to lie
in a novel, and what I wanted most of all was to
tell the truth." What do you think of this
statement? Karr's father was famous for the tales
he told during meetings of the Liars' Club. At
any point did you feel that the author was
perhaps altering or stretching the truth?
- In the introduction to this guide, Karr states
that while on tour to promote The Liars' Club
people from all walks of life told her they
identified with her story. Do you identify with
the Karr family? Did this influence you while you
were reading the book? Is it "the essential
American story," as one reviewer stated?
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