Mary Karr begins her gritty narrative on the violent night in 1961 when her mother, Charlie Marie Moore Karr, was carted away because she was “nervous” (read “crazy”). In the hardscrabble East Texas oil refinery town of Leechfield, Charlie had always stood out. She had “artist’s airs” about her, a hangover no doubt from her abortive escape to New York. She drank too much. Focusing on her own seventh and eighth years, Karr creates a world of child-eyed views that are deepened and colored by the before and after, by anecdotes of grandparents, and by her adult musings on the barren, sometimes cruel precincts of her upbringing. Mary Karr didn’t have a storybook childhood. As The Liars’ Club brings home, it was filled with unreliable adults and unpredictable but ever present furies. Nonetheless, and quite remarkably, it is truly and harshly beautiful, an exceptionally intense, honest, and quite funny coming-of-age tale, written in language that sings with indelible poetry.
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