THE LIAR’S CLUB - MARY KARR

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Amazing. I’ve read some Karr before; I was interested in her poetry in college and her relationship with DFW back when I was reading through his work. I’ve read some of her various memoir works before but I saw this available at a used book store and figured I’d dive in and see what all the fuss was about. This is perhaps the best memoir I’ve ever read. Not in terms of how exciting or interesting the central-life was, but rather in terms of how well it’s written. Indeed, not too much goes on, plot-wise. Karr is born to a family of wild alcoholics in a poor east Texas town and reports on the dysfunction. As a quick aside, this is also the part of the country UGK is from. There is certainly no shortage of alcohol memoirs, or my-crazy-family memoirs. Karr’s writing is what sets this apart. She’s able to balance how she felt as a child, what the milieu of the shithole Texas town, the deep-traumas of her parents and family, all without getting didactic or merely lurid. The way she slowly uncovers the background of her parents, in order to give us some context for their destructive drinking deepens the emotional impact of the book. It’d be much easier and understandable if Karr had merely listed the myriad ways her parents had failed her, but she’s always able to situated it in a larger social picture. Actually, it was this social acuity that really surprised me. This book is the good version of HILLBILLY ELEGY. Like HE, it is a memoir of a writer growing up in a poor YT town and how/why people’s lives are ruined in such places. While Vance is remarkably uninterested in the actual causes, he’s content to simply tell them to work harder, Karr is more curious and actually able to diagnose why her town seems to be turning out broken men/women with shitty lives. She’s also much more honest and thoughtful about race (Vance has insane, deeply stupid theories about race-relations w/r/t rural YTs). Her dad hangs out with a group of oil-workers (like himself) one of whom, Shug, is black. “Nobody says flat out, you're just picking on Shug because he’s colored. It sometimes seems to me like we’re not supposed to notice that Shug’s colored, or that saying anything about it would be bad manners. That puzzles me because Shug’s being colored strikes me as real obvious. And usually anybody’s differences get pounced on and picked at. This silence is a lie peculiar to a man’s skin color, which makes it extra serious and extra puzzling.” Karr is able to see and comment on subtle racial dynamics without simplification or easy answers. She’s also really good at describing a phenomena I haven’t experienced personally but many of my female friends have talked with me about. When the book opens and Karr is young, 6-7, she’s very close with her wild-man, roughneck dad. He takes her to the bars, she sees him fight people, he helps her shot and is generally a lot of fun. Karr captures how he grows distant and withdrawn as she ages and goes through puberty and becomes a “woman.” Since his category for women isn’t able to expand, nor can he make an exception for his daughter, they drift apart. He can’t abide a break in the gender roles and expectations and can’t relate to his daughter as well when he sees her as a woman, not a girl. There are a few brutal rapes in the book, but otherwise, I found it really easy and quick to read. It’s hard to overstate how good and clear of a writer Karr is. I think I’ll fuck with the other 2 memoirs of her’s. 61 shots of whiskey.