I Read Mary Karr’s ‘The Liars’ Club’
I don’t know how ‘favorite books’ happen. There’s a feeling that starts to sink into the pages as I hold it. There’s a faint siren in my head calling me back to them when I’m not around it. I walk through metaphysical hallways in the shape of the book’s theme, I hear conversations as they stand in comparison with those from the text. There’s a unique feeling, a sense that something special is happening as those words smack against your eyes and siphon into your language center. Is it organic? Is it magic? I can’t quite say. But over the course my life there have been books that just begin to speak in a way that captivates me, silver or gold, good or evil, joyous or miserable. The Liars’ Club is one of those books.
As I read through the first half of this book (all under the heading Texas, 1961), I was agape. This portion followed Mary through her rough and ragged childhood, a more-than-latchkey kid, running wild through the working town of Leechfield. Her phrases were her own. Her visions were only in her mind. Her violence and vengeance was boiled up from a tarnished youth between two parents who were very clearly ‘just figuring it out’.
Stories and memoirs about our childhoods often become stories of our parents. Even when it tells of our journeys without them, even when it tells of the dangers of our wayward wandering, there is always the shape of our parents’ absence in their lack of care, guidance or presence. So much of the first part of this book is Karr tossing yowls into the dark beyond of Childhood and the echoes coming back in the shape of questions that she raised, specifically about her mother. While the book is titled after a boys’ club that her father would tell tall tales around and through, Karr’s mother is the primary character not only here, but throughout this entire book. While her father’s presence looms largely as a prominent and protective male figure, hanging in the fibers of every shirt like a smoker’s wardrobe, he too has some level of absence and nomadic neglect that shapes the ways in which Karr was able to thrive and fail and all that lies between throughout her youth.
From a distance, reading this all had a bit of a “aren’t things so wild!” kind of feeling, like all of the good times in Goonies and The Sandlot and Stand By Me. Her observations about her backwards grandmother, about her strong-willed and middle-country leaning mother all were told with a kind of fire that you share with friends about how fucked up your family life has been. It cuts accurately and sharply, but it cuts like you’re carving a cake or stabbing your initials into an oak. I laughed out loud many times and thought this whole ride was going to be a sour reflection on what it’s like to survive with so many corroded memories in tact, but with a pride and stature that you made your way through it with a fresh perspective. This kind of is but mostly isn’t this book.
As we make our exit from the first part of the book, things take a turn for the extraordinarily desperate. Chapter 7’s retelling of one of her mother’s episodes stood out to me in a way that I could all but circle just the title of it. It’s masterfully retold, captured in her mind’s eye and cast to us as if through a slashing and swirling crystal. Karr’s use of language stands with a confidence, with an enormous sense of itself, as if she is able to direct and fire her inner monologue from a mile away. Like a whip that snaps against the speed of sound, it’s witty, sarcastic, fresh. Many times over, it reminded me of the dry buttes of a Cormac McCarthy passage, instead spun with a feminine power almost more taut than his own. But as it simmered through some of these opening corridors of a childhood darkness, the way that desperation and smallness and loneliness and the Needs of a Child begin to show up, there’s a humanity to it that leaks out. Despite the massive figure of all of what came before it, we now know from whence the voice came.
Through Part Two (Colorado, 1963) and Part Three (Texas Again, 1980) things mostly turn from accelerated and burning and wild and lush to a far more stripped down sadness, one laced with caution. The young girls are at the mercy of their mother’s heedless spontaneity, her drink, and the company she keeps. A chasm grows and grows. Just kids under the age of 12, Mary and her sister try to survive on razor’s edge between going feral and remaining civilized. There feels to be a wild-eyed savagery being barely kept behind the veil as the two girls zig-zag between a school that doesn’t want them and a home life that doesn’t help them. Things, people begin to die a couple of decades later, and the way that death doesn’t rear its head with celerity, but instead groans and chews ahead, smashing the construction that had been built.
Over the last dozen pages or so, though, revelations begin to take shape between the women in the family and we see from where the damage has come and how it managed to take the shape of the incessant deluge that rained down on all the family had tried to build. There’s a clarity that comes through in the end, a togetherness that is shaped in the structure of all the chaos that was built before it. Memoirs are strange in that they are written through a very specific lens. “Endings” aren’t possible in that the events of this story, this life, are still carrying on. But we do get definition. We get a foundational timeline of how there could be healing, how there could be understanding. If Karr were to lay the laminate of answers she received over the cartography of how she got there, the route she followed would be a bit more clear, if not any easier.
Reading through the first half of this, the reactions I had were almost too positive. Too lighthearted. “This book rules” reads the conclusion of one update, almost cheapening the hammer that would later fall. I loved this book throughout. Its hard fought and misperceived joy right up against its anvil-dense and bone-deep sadness. Again, the language stands up against some of my favorite authors, not only in the way that it emboldens itself to be crass, but also in the way that it weaves a very intricate cloth over a life that was lived so precariously. I heavily recommend this book as it’s one of the most explicit and vulnerable exhibitions of humanity, of young womanhood and family without leaning into any Hard Lessons or Cautionary Tales. These accounts feel real. Their darkness feels unforgettable, unavoidable, tenuous. This has the feeling of ‘a favorite book’, one that I couldn’t get away from while reading, but also one that won’t get away from me now that I’ve completed it. [Trigger warnings for sure for physical and domestic abuse along with rape and sexual assault.]
