Liars' Club (Karr)

Book Reviews
The title of the poet Mary Karr's extraordinary new memoir is taken from the name that came to be attached to the informal club formed by her father and his drinking buddies....Ms. Karr inherited her father's remarkable gift for storytelling, and she has used that gift to create one of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years....Her most powerful tool is her language, which she wields with the virtuosity of both a lyric poet and an earthy, down-home Texan.... She's able to describe everything ... with equal poise, precision and wit. It's a skill used in these pages in the service of a wonderfully unsentimental vision that redeems the past even as it recaptures it on paper. Ms. Karr has written an astonishing book.
Michikio Kakutani - New York Times

At its best, in the hands of a writer able to command the tools of the novelist— character, scene, plot—the memoir can achieve unmatchable depth and resonance. The Liars' Club, which recently reached No. 5 on the paperback best-seller list, is a classic of American literature. Tending her postage stamp of reality, as Faulkner advised, Mary Karr conjures the simmering heat and bottled rage of life in a small Texas oil town with an intensity that gains power from its verisimilitude —from the fact that it's fact.
James Atlas - New York 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.
Boston Globe

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 Ivans - The Nation

Crackles with energy and wit...a wild and wooly contribution to the annals of American childhood.
Los Angeles Times

Although Karr, a prize-winning poet (The Devil's Tour) survived a nightmarish childhood with a violent father and an alcoholic mother who married six times, she bears neither parent any animosity in this candid and humorous memoir. Karr and her older sister grew up in an east Texas oil town where they learned to cope with their mother's psychotic episodes, the ostracism by neighbors and their father's frequent absences. Karr's happiest times were the afternoons she spent at the "Liars' Club,'' where her father and a group of men drank and traded boastful stories. Raped by a teenager when she was eight and sexually abused by a male babysitter, she developed a fighting spirit and impressed schoolmates with her toughness. Karr vividly details her parents' divorce and eventual remarriage, as well as her father's deterioration after a stroke. It is evident that she views her parents with affection and an unusual understanding of their weaknesses.
Publishers Weekly