The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr (English) Paperback Book

Description: The Liars' Club by Mary Karr The author, a prize-winning poet and critic, looks back at her upbringing in a swampy East Texas refinery town. She recalls her painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip into psychosis; a fist-swinging father who spun tales with his cronies--dubbed the Liars Club; and a neighborhood rape when she was eight. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description #4 onThe New York Times list of The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 YearsTheNew York Timesbestselling, hilarious tale of a hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation"Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poets ear." -Oprah.comThe Liars Clubtook the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karrs comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salingers-a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as "funny, lively, and un-put-downable" (USA Today)today as it ever was. Author Biography Mary Karr kick-started a memoir revolution with The Liars Club, which was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, a best book of the year for The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, People and Time, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Karr has won the Whiting Award, Radcliffes Bunting Fellowship, and Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays, and she has been a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. Her other bestselling books include The Art of Memoir, the memoirs Lit and Cherry, and the poetry collection Sinners Welcome, Viper Rum, The Devils Tour, and Abacus. The Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, Karr lives in New York City. Review "The essential American story ... a beauty." —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World"Astonishing ... one of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a backup opinion...its like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poets precision of language and a poets insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing event." —Molly Ivins, The Nation"9mm humor, gothic wit, and a stunning clarity of memory within a poets vision.... Karrs unerring scrutiny of her childhood delivers a story confoundingly real." —The Boston Sunday Globe"Overflows with sparkling wit and humor.... Truth beats powerfully at the heart of this dazzling memoir." —San Francisco Chronicle Review Quote "The essential American story ... a beauty." Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide INTRODUCTION The Family Sideshow When I set out on a book tour to promote the memoir about my less than perfect Texas clan, I did so with soul-sucking dread. Surely wed be held up as grotesques, my beloveds and I, real moral circus freaks. Instead I shoved into bookstores where sometimes hundreds of people stood claiming to identify with my story, which fact stunned me. Maybe these peoples family lives differed in terms of surface pyrotechnics -- houses set fire to and fortunes squandered. But the feelings didnt. After eight weeks of travel, I ginned up this working definition for a dysfunctional family: any family with more than one person in it. Maybe coming-of-age memoirs are being bought and read by the boatload precisely because they offer some window into other peoples whacked-out families, with which nearly everyone born in the fractured baby-boom era can identify. They also guarantee a central character emotionally engaged in a family narrative. Any writers voice -- even an omniscient, third-person narrators in fiction -- serves as a character in the text. But in memoir, the alleged "truth" of a given voice makes it somehow more emotionally compelling. It announces itself as real. Because family memoir lodges us in a writers personal history, we can almost see the voice being shaped by factors of geography, socio-economics, psychology. Like a ghost that assembles itself from mist, so the writers self seems to appear from her voice. Believe this, the autobiographer says, its real. If metafiction has been working double-overtime to explode the lie that fiction is true, memoir somewhat reestablishes the readers dream. Of course, most readers doubt the absolute veracity of a memoirs reconstructed dialogue and so forth. Tobias Wolff noted in a recent lecture at Syracuse University that all memory involves imagination and vice-versa. Some memoirs also clearly wander into the realm of the fantastic to construct what read like family myths -- Maxine Hong Kingstons Woman Warrior , for instance. There the author steals her Chinese mothers method of "talking-story" to meld her own somewhat conflicting Chinese and American selves. Still, we presume that the truths skeleton underlay Hong Kingstons tale. So the character speaking to us from those events also feels, in some way, like a more real escort through the drama than a fictional narrators. However "real" Ishmael may seem in Moby Dick , Mary McCarthy offers me as a reader what feels like greater intimacy with a living character in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Dont get me wrong. Greater intimacy with a narrator isnt always what a reader wants: I havent given up reading novels. But in the cocooned isolation we occupy at this millenniums end, a friendly voice on a page has value. A childs voice or perspective can also open the often firmly locked door to a readers own memories of youth. When I read in Harry Crewss A Childhood how that backwoods Georgia boy made up stories about models in the Sears catalog, I identified with it wholesale, even though I grew up far from the savage poverty Crews lays out: "Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple.... I knew that under those [Sears models] fancy clothes, there had to be swellings and boils of one kind or another because there was no other way to live in the world." Anybody would twig to some universal truth about the childhood Crews describes here, I think. We all lose our innocence in part by coming to marvel at the rift between ones private life -- family fights, say -- and the glossy families sold by the media. Crewss voice conjures that innocence for us, the time when a family universe was still so colossal that you could project that reality onto the lives of strangers. Crewss private experience ultimately overrode the lie of the Sears catalog. The stories he made up with his friend gave him, he later wrote, "an overwhelming sense of well-being and profound power." Crewss survival is also encouraging, a testimony of sorts. In a class on memoir I taught at Syracuse University last year, my students puzzled me at the terms end by praising the genres sense of hope. Of the dark and dire stories wed read -- mental institutions for Susanna Kaysen and rape for Maya Angelou -- hope didnt seem the leading emotion (except perhaps in Henry Louis Gatess Colored People ). "They lived to write books," one student said. "They grew up and got away from their parents," said another. The fact that the writers outlived their troubled pasts, walked out of them into adulthood, ultimately served as empowering for that class of readers. Not everyones so wowed by what memoir offers up. William Gass took a hard swipe at the whole genre in Harpers last May ("Autobiography in the Age of Narcissism") primarily scolding the genres lack of truth. "The autobiographer is likely to treat records with less respect than he should.... Autobiographers flush before examining their stools." For "truth" Gass favors history without bothering to note -- as Tobias Wolff did in the aforementioned lecture -- that historians are no more neutral toward their subjects than memoirists are. Nor can such primary sources as letters and diaries be construed as "objective." Gass also neglected historys glaring failures. My high school history text cheerfully described the westward migration without a glance at the native peoples whose bones got plowed under in the process. Gass also praised fiction for veracity because it doesnt announce itself as true. I could borrow that same reasoning to defend memoir for its blatant subjectivity. In our time weve watched most great sources of "objective" truth -- churches and scientific studies and presidents among them -- topple in terms of their moral authority. So any pose of authority can seem the ultimate fakery. In this way, Michael Herrs psychedelic memoir of Vietnam, Dispatches , seems way more authentic to me in describing that war than the Defense Departments records "objectively" assembled under Robert McNamara. In our loneliness for some sense that were behaving well inside our very isolated families, personal experience has assumed some new power. Just as the novel form once took up experiences of urban, industrialized society that werent being handled in epic poems or epistles, so memoir -- reliant on a single, intensely personal voice for its unifying glue -- wrestles subjects in a way that readers of late find compelling. The good ones Ive read confirm my experience in a flawed family. They reassure me the way belonging to a community reassures you. My bookstore chats did the same. On the road, I came to believe -- despite the dire edicts from Newt Gingrich and the media about the moral, drug-besotted quagmire into which weve all sunk -- that our families are working, albeit in new forms. People have gone on birthing babies and burying their dead and loving those with whom they shared troubled patches of history. We do this partly by telling stories -- fictional and non-fictional ones -- in voices that neither deny family struggles nor make demons of our beloveds. ABOUT MARY KARR Mary Karr grew up near Port Arthur, Texas. She has won Pushcart Prizes for both her poetry and her essays, and her work appears in such magazines as Granta , Parnassus , Vogue , Esquire , Poetry , The New Yorker , and The American Poetry Review . Her two volumes of poetry are The Devils Tour and Abacus . She has been awarded grants from the NEA, the Whiting Foundation, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, and others. Karr has been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine , Harpers Bazaar , and Mirabella . The Liars Club , which has appeared on bestseller lists across the country, is the winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Prize for Best Nonfiction. It was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and selected as an American Library Association Notable Book. The Liars Club was chosen as one of the best books of 1995 by People, Time, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly. Karr, who has worked as a Fellow at the Harvard Business School and as a crawfish trucker in Texas, currently teaches literature and creative writing at Syracuse University. She lives in upstate New York with her son. Praise " The Liars Club is a classic of American literature.... Mary Karr conjures the simmering heat and bottled rage of life in a small Texas oil town with an intensity that gains power from the fact that its fact." --James Atlas , The New York Times Magazine "An astonishing book.... Her most powerful tool is her language, which she wields with the virtuosity of both a lyric poet and an earthy, down-home Texan.... One of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years." --Michiko Kakutani , The New York Times "This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a back-up opinion.... Its like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poets precision of language and a poets gift for understanding emotion and a poets insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astounding event." --Molly Ivins , The Nation "A triumphant achievement in the art of memoir and the art of living.... Karr fills her turbulent pages with a prose as pungen Details ISBN0143035746 Author Mary Karr Pages 352 Language English Edition 10th ISBN-10 0143035746 ISBN-13 9780143035749 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY B Year 2005 Short Title LIARS CLUB REV/E 10/E Edition Description Revised Residence NY, US Birth 1938 Imprint Penguin USA Subtitle A Memoir Place of Publication New York, NY Country of Publication United States DOI 10.1604/9780143035749 US Release Date 2005-05-31 UK Release Date 2005-05-31 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Publication Date 2005-05-31 Replaces 9780140179835 Illustrations 3 B&W PHOTOS THROUGHOUT Audience General NZ Release Date 2005-05-30 AU Release Date 2005-05-30 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:43648245;

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