Does memory ever reflect reality? Is it instead a mixture of nostalgia, cerebral junk-drawer scrounging, and lies you sell yourself into believing? And if fact and fiction wind up jumbled, are you better off?
The title of this memoir about growing up in East Texas at the dawn of the 1960s begs those questions. I guess it also gives an answer, which is print the legend. No doubt Mary Karr lived the life she writes about. But did she remember every detail of it, like the texture of her mother’s bedquilt, or the brand of coffee can her father spit tobacco juice in?
Color me skeptical, but so what. Karr’s ability to enrich this recounting of her childhood in such fulsome detail enhances a reading experience that becomes very soon not at all like paper and paste but rather a piece of living soul quivering in your hands.
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?” It takes over 300 pages before any answers are given, but by that time I was hooked too deep into the rest of the story to notice.
Mary Karr grew up with an older sister, Lecia and not much else in the way of a guiding hand. Her mother struggled with alcohol and suicidal depression, while her father failed to be present for much of her tender years, driven off by a fundamental incompatibility with his spouse. “In his world, only full-blown lunatics got divorced,” she recalls. “Regular citizens in a bad marriage just hunkered down and stood it.”
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| Young Mary struggled to fit in with other children. "They still saw the world as some playground smiled over by God. I
couldn’t, and their innocence rankled me to the point of fury." Above, a group of Texas kids sometime in the 1960s. Image from https://lonls.wordpress.com/2007/06/19/texas-kids-1960s/ |
It was a different time then, and Liars’ Club gives you a flavor of what it was like growing up around hurricanes and parents who smoked like chimneys and brought six packs for the road. People were harder, more judgmental, yet in their own tribal way they cared about each other.
Women dealt with bad marriages with the help of alcohol and pills. Men did, too, but they could also socialize more. Mary’s father hung out with a group of pals whose collective name provides this book’s title:
They met at the American Legion or in the back room of Fisher’s Bait Shop at times when their wives thought they were paying bills or down at the union hall. Somebody’s pissed-off wife eventually christened them the Liars’ Club, and it stuck. Certainly not much of the truth in any technical sense got told there.
The Liar’s Club gang does not dominate Karr’s narrative, but their interludes provide a pit stop between explosions at the Karr home. There her father imparts wisdom his sponge-like daughter recollects, along with what it meant to her then.
Even when he is retailing the tallest of tales, Mary is enraptured by the way Daddy holds his audience, and herself.
I’ve plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you. At the same time, I’m more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell you the truth.
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| Mary Karr in 2015. While best known for Liars' Club, she has published two more memoirs and several books of poetry. She is a literature professor at Syracuse University. Photo by Deborah Feingold from https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/11/09/the-truth-keeps-you-young/ |
But how much of The Liar’s Club is told in that same spirit? Having read this before, and been gobsmacked by it, I was ready to read it again from a more skeptical lens. In doing so, I sensed many times Karr letting me know she wasn’t trying or expecting to be taken at face value.
Some of this is spelled out in the book. Often, she will step back as the narrator, explaining how she is contracting the timeline here or dealing with a lapse in memory there. Sometimes she notes that Lecia, who did disappoint her as a girl by selling her fake jewels for real money and as an adult by voting Republican, will have a different take on a shared childhood experience.
But mostly it is the precision with which she recalls so much from her past, the very thing that sold me the first time, which made me wary on this second read, even as I could appreciate its effect:
No sooner had that low yellow car halted in its tracks then every family on the block started from their various houses, prepared to stay a while, wearing windbreakers and winter jackets and rain slickers in case the fat clouds overhead broke open. They pulled their lawn chairs out of garage storage, aimed them to face us, and sat watching like we were some drive-in movie projected across the soft grey horizon.
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| A love of painting and classic blues records by Texas's own Esther Phillips (above) kept Mary's mother sane only so long: "Maybe drinking caused Mother to go crazy, or maybe the craziness was
just standing in line to happen and the drinking actually staved it off a
while." Image from http://www.soulwalking.co.uk/Esther%20Phillips.html |
The
back of my paperback copy blurbs “A wickedly funny account of an apocalyptic
childhood,” which feels out of place in a book that includes two first-hand
accounts of rape before Mary turns nine, and a host of other outrages and
cruelties. Dave Barry this isn’t.
There definitely is humor. Karr writes with growling sarcasm and a withering gaze at the hypocrisy she experienced; sometimes even drove.
For example, there was the grandmother who terrorized Mary for her backtalk and lack of religion, whose painful death by cancer Mary and Lecia would retail by visiting neighbors to scare up some sympathy treats:
At the end of this report, Lecia and I would start scanning around whoever’s kitchen it was for cookies or Kool-Aid. We knew a certain instinct that reporting on a dead grandma deserves some payoff. After awhile, Lecia even learned to muster some tears, which could jack-up the ante as high as a Popsicle.
Liars’ Club is divided into three sections. The first establishes the unsettled family situation, how Mother (I don’t think Karr ever uses her parents’ first names) had a bohemian outlook on life that embraced art and numerous ex-husbands. (“My mother didn’t date, she married.”)
When a hurricane warning went off, instead of finding cover Mother stayed where she was and yelled obscenities at God. The more comment she drew from neighbors, the more defiant she became, a trait she passed on to her younger daughter:
Those other grownups were scared. Not only of my parents but of me. My wildness scared them.
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| Mary's father was one of many thousands of East Texans who made a living off the state's main cash crop, oil. Above, the Kilgore Oil Fields have been pumping out billions of barrels of oil since the 1930s. Image from https://texashighways.com/travel/the-east-texas-oil-field-changed-kilgore-forever/ |
Daddy has his job in the oil fields and his friends to keep him occupied, but he also has booze and smokes, and is hellbent on living his life just as independently, if not as irresponsibly, as his wife. For a time, there is also Grandma Moore, who carried a quirt to use on her granddaughters.
Subtitled “Texas, 1961,” this is the section of the book that contains most of the dramatic highlights of the narrative. After that, the family comes into some money and moves northwest for the second section, “Colorado, 1963.” This establishes how dangerous the situation was for Mary and her sister, as Mother became a full-blown alcoholic, chasing Daddy away and making time with no-account easy-rider types.
On the plus side, the girls did get to ride their own horses:
The horse rocking me as he picked his way over stones had a rhythm like the Gulf, which until that night I’d never once thought of. It was a fetal rhythm, I guess, the kind that sneaks under your heartbeat and makes your brain waves go all slack and your eyelids seam themselves together.
The third and final section, “Texas Again, 1980,” shows where the family wound up and draws things to an ambiguously positive conclusion that feels a little like victory, though it loses the momentum of the first two sections.
“I never knew despair could lie,” she writes, and, though this is never a merry book, you understand what she means.
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| 1961's Hurricane Carla, one of the most powerful hurricanes Texas ever knew, arrives near the end of Liars' Club's first section. Mary and her family escape the hurricane but are nearly killed during the evacuation. Image from https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/hurricane-carla |
Karr herself time and again reminds you all what you are reading is being processed inside the head of a small girl. That subjective lens is central to the unique way Liars’ Club operates, telescoping experiences even as she relates them, giving them a surreal quality that makes them more outrageous or horrific.
Karr was best-known for her poetry before this memoir came out, and her ability to conjure up elaborate, sometimes whimsical visions with a handful of words is both bottomless and amazing:
You never notice how hooked up to everybody you feel when you hear that rush of air under the dial tone, as if all the world’s circuits are just waiting to hear you – anyway, you never notice that till it goes away. Then it’s like you listen, expecting that faraway sound, and instead you get only the numb quiet of your own skull not knowing what to think of next.
The Liars’ Club makes clear how tricky a thing memory can be, creating an old-fashioned game of telephone between a girl and the woman she becomes, in which neither has access to the whole truth, but each has something the other doesn’t. In the grown-up Karr’s case, it is the ability to draw reasonable conclusions from what she felt at the time and what she knows now. Blessedly or not, even Karr can only remember so much in the end.
I have no doubt that Karr’s memory was significantly buttressed by imaginative reconstruction and a lot of therapy. There is a feeling of rediscovery on every page, whether that be a long-long sibling or an artificial leg. Memory is a living thing for her, an ongoing dialogue with a past that is far from over.
The Liars’ Club was a minor sensation when it was published; its ability to shock and captivate is hardly diminished by the passage of time. Karr manages to sustain a 300-page plus conversation with her own memory and keeps you reading throughout.
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