My father comes into focus for me on a Liars' Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can't but write it in the present tense.
Mary Karr grew up in a swampy East Texas refinery town in a volatile and defiantly loving family. In this funny, devastating, haunting memoir and with a raw and often painful honesty, she looks back at life with a painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip over into psychosis, and a hard-drinking, fist-swinging father who liked nothing to spin tales with his cronies at the Liars' Club.
When it was published in 1995, The Liars' Club raised the art of memoir to a new level and brought about a dramatic revival of the form. It is a book that paints a harsh world redeemed by Karr's warmth, intelligent humour and finely spun prose; The Liars' Club is both heart-stopping and heart-felt.
'You'll want to forget it and won't be able to' Zadie Smith
'Astonishing . . . One of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years' New York Times
A poet and essayist, Mary Karr lives in New York State.
Show more
My father comes into focus for me on a Liars' Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can't but write it in the present tense.
Mary Karr grew up in a swampy East Texas refinery town in a volatile and defiantly loving family. In this funny, devastating, haunting memoir and with a raw and often painful honesty, she looks back at life with a painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip over into psychosis, and a hard-drinking, fist-swinging father who liked nothing to spin tales with his cronies at the Liars' Club.
When it was published in 1995, The Liars' Club raised the art of memoir to a new level and brought about a dramatic revival of the form. It is a book that paints a harsh world redeemed by Karr's warmth, intelligent humour and finely spun prose; The Liars' Club is both heart-stopping and heart-felt.
'You'll want to forget it and won't be able to' Zadie Smith
'Astonishing . . . One of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years' New York Times
A poet and essayist, Mary Karr lives in New York State.
Show moreThe international bestseller from a prize-winning poet and critic.
A poet and essayist, Mary Karr lives in New York State.
Harrowing but funny . . . A father prone to brawls; a
heavy-drinking mother who teetered on the verge of
self-destruction; a grandmother who carried a hacksaw in her
handbag. But through it all shines humour, warmth and genuine
love.
*Sunday Times*
Her grandmother carried a hacksaw in her handbag, her mother hit
the bottle, her home was once voted one of the ten ugliest towns on
the planet and to cap it all, she was raped . . . What makes this
such extraordinary reading is that, far from being a catalogue of
horrors, The Liars' Club is often very funny.
*Guardian*
The Liars' Club is written by a master of poetically slangy prose,
a language so alive it makes the telling of acutely painful
experiences seem like child's play. You relax into a light
adventure or innocent beauty, wholly unprepared for the sudden
jolts of harrowing violence experienced by the tiny "Little Mary".
You cry at her dark loneliness, you rejoice at her humour and
defiance. When you finish the last chapter, you quite simply
celebrate her survival.
*Independent*
Astonishing . . . One of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to
come along in years.
*New York Times*
It's difficult to believe that childhood rape, mental instability,
arson and lingering death could produce a book in any way
uplifting, but that's what Mary Karr achieves in this splendid
memoir, characterised by gallows humour and unflinching fortitude .
. . Exceptionally powerful.
*Observer*
Breathtakingly shrewd and loving
*Independent*
Utterly Gripping
*Sunday Times*
You`ll want to forget it and won't be able to.
*Guardian*
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