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 Memoirist
& Poet
5th Avenue Theatre
December 9, 1996
Biography
Excerpt
Selected Works
Links
Biography
Through memory, Mary Karr has reconstructed the harrowing events of her
upbringing. The stories comprising Karr's bestselling memoir The Liars'
Club (1995) occur primarily in the years 1961 to 1963, when she was
roughly ages 7 to 9, then leapfrog ahead to 1980, when her tale reaches
a tentative close. Since its publication, The Liars' Club has become
surrounded by yet another layer of intriguing yarns: those of how the
book came under contract to be written and how readers responded to her
raw truths.
As Karr tells it, the book's genesis was partly serendipitous, partly
inevitable, and partly a practical solution to a jam. In 1989, Karr received
a $25,000 Whiting Writer's Award, which enabled her to complete The
Devil's Tour, her second book of poetry. (She was also holding down
an office job at that time.) At a celebration dinner, Karr sat with another
award recipient, writer Tobias Wolff, her friend and former teacher at
Goddard College (where she earned an MFA) and his agent Amanda Urban.
Karr began spinning tales of her early family life, and Urban urged her
to put together a proposal and sample chapters. The book was sold to Viking
before Karr had time to think twice about all that might be involved in
dredging up the past. Of her motivation, Karr says, "My marriage
ended, and I needed the money. I didn't have a car. I didn't have any
furniture." She also adds, "If you're a writer and grow up in
a family like mine, you have to go out of your way not to write about
it."
The task was searing: "When I started unpacking my memory and sitting
in the middle of it all day, I had the most bizarre experiences—I'd
write an hour and a half or two hours and then lie down on the floor of
my study and sleep the sleep of the dead." Taped above her computer
was a letter from Wolff offering her this advice: "Take no care for
your dignity. Don't be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse,
mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Don't approach your
history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruits. Tell your
stories, and your story will be revealed." Karr's mother, on the
other hand, put it more bluntly. "Hell, get it off your chest,"
she counseled.
Karr seems to have accepted both directives, stripping her past bare and
risking full exposure. The Liars' Club (a title borrowed from her
father's drinking buddies) hits the reader between the eyes with horrific
experiences—alcoholism, attempted infanticide, and sexual molestation
among them. Nonetheless it is an oddly hopeful and darkly comic book,
largely because of its pungent East Texas idiom and the strong emotional
ties that bind the family, despite the tumult. Seven-year-old Mary Karr
is the last person anyone would have wanted to sit next to in grade school,
yet her feisty toughness carries the narrative. That Karr's mother (now
sober and still living in Karr's hometown) supported Karr in writing openly
from her child's-eye point of view bears testimony to family courage.
Karr followed The Liar's Club with another memoir, Cherry
(2000), about her teenage years.
Excerpt taken from The Liars Club (1996)
At dusk in the late summer in 1962, the mosquitoes rose up from the bayous
and drainage ditches. Kids fell ill with the sleeping sickness, as we
called encephalitis. Marvalene Seesacque came out of a six-month coma
that left her what we called half-a-bubble off plumb. Other kids weren't
luck enough even to wake up, and for the front page of the paper, Mother
had taken a slew of funeral pictures with tiny coffins. A mosquito truck
was dispatched from Leechfield Public Works to smoke down the bad swarms.
It puttered down the streets every evening trailing a long cloud of DDT
from a hose as big around as a dinner plate. Our last game of the day
that summer often involved mounting our bikes and having a slow race behind
the mosquito truck.
A slow race is the definitive Leechfield competition. You win it by coming
in last. This might sound easy enough to do unless you're riding a two-wheeler,
in which case slowing too far down makes you tump over. The trick was
to pedal just fast enough to stay upright, but not fast enough to pull
ahead of anybody. Add to this the wet white cloud of poison the mosquito
truck pumped out to wrap around your sweaty body and send a sweet burn
through your lungs, and you have just the kind of game we liked best--one
where the winners got to vomit and faint. That was what I remember Tommy
Sharp doing, vomiting in the ditch in front of the swimming pool. Shirley
Carter set down the kickstand on her red Schwinn just in time to pass
out cold as a wedge on the roadside, so that Lyle Petit's mother, who
worked as a nurse, had to be called to blow into her face and get her
going again. Not a winner, I was standing in the crowd of kids watching
her blue face get pinker when my mother started calling me.
All the kids looked up. It was never Mother who called us. Mother rarely
even came out in the front yard since Mr. Sharp had told her she was going
to hell for drinking beer and breast-feeding me on the porch. 'You could
see evil in the crotch of a tree, you old fart,' she was supposed to have
said in reply. Since then, it was Daddy who hauled the garbage out front
and did any calling home for supper. At the sound of her voice, the kids
all started a little the way a herd of antelope on one of those African
documentaries will lift their heads from the water hole at the first scent
of a lion.
I started running, vaulting the muddy ditches that ran in front of the
identical houses. I'd just leapt over one of the squat towers of mud that
crawdads left when I saw my grandmother's red Ford wagon parked in front
of our house. Our car always arrived from even the shortest trip strewn
with candy wrappers and soda bottles and a coffee can sloshing with pee.
But when I peeked into the Ford's window, it looked like the old woman
had driven clear across the state of Texas with nothing more than a box
of pink tissues. Mother was holding the screen door open and shading her
eyes as I climbed up onto the concrete porch. Her cheekbones winged out,
and her eyes were the flawed green of cracked marbles. She told me that
Grandma had cancer and had come to stay with us for a while, but that
I shouldn't let on I knew.
Selected
Works
Abacus, poetry (1987)
The Devil's Tour, poetry (1994)
The Liars' Club (1995)
Cherry (2000)
Web
Site Links
Salon.com interview
with Mary Karr
Reading group guide
for The Liar's Club
Book review
of Cherry
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