The Liars Club – Term Paper

 The memoir of Mary Karr, as written in the Liar’s Club book tells about Karr childhood in East Texas in the early 1960s (Marler, 2005). The story describes the Karr family dynamics, challenges she faced, and how she overcame them. She describes the struggles and challenges she went through while being brought up in a family as well as a town where alcohol abuse and other psychological problems were common. Karr together with her sister lives a virtually motherless life and fiercely sought to understand their parents, their family relationships, and their lives. This paper describes the dynamics faced by the young Karr family, the obstacles she faced while growing up, and how she dealt with them.

The Liar’s Club Summery

Considering the chaos of Karr childhood, it is no small accomplishment that she survived to adulthood. Her family more so her parents’ marriage had its moments of happiness and tender but most of the times it was noisy, fractious, and self-destructive. Karr’s father only loved when his mind was in it, but his real life was always at work where drinking men who used to play dominoes off-days were his audience. Her mother would still be around and would heavily drink, and as Karr retreats into her artistic fantasies she described it as “nervous,” that is, having a mental imbalance (Marler, 2005). These were the kind of parents that Karr had.

Karr memoirs on the condition of the bar tell more of how it is hard to survive in such an environment which was considered to be among the ugliest towns in Texas. She says that the bar delineated the hourly wage and the realm of sweat though she would easily leave such work as college was educating her to leave it (Marler, 2005). Salary was spare, and work rewards were rare to come across by, and no one would congratulate her for clocking out. She could only get the physical comforts of cold beer and “hot boudin” sausage (Marler, 2005). The working conditions were harsh, and she considered giving the job a more attention that it didn’t even deserve.

Karr had to put a brave face on her childhood though she hardly forgot the bruising aspects. She greatly hated her grandmother whom they lived together as she was succumbing to cancer and when her grandmother died Karr almost rejoiced but she remembered something in her had too died. Though Mary Karr didn’t miss her grandmother one iota, Karr felt a loss of her trusts in order of the world. Karr describes in harrowing detail the moment her mother finally snapped; the day that she became an old fear, the day that instilled what she became (Marler, 2005). She didn’t want her mother to a commit suicide. Her heart almost got broke when her parents divorced, but it mended incompletely when they got back together again.

For Mary Karr to overcome the childhood challenges including those of her family she had to undergo a transformation from the little girl she was to a young woman in her adulthood. She was a solid girl inside like when an individual twists a binoculars lens to perfect depths to figure out what one is looking definitely. Through college education and a healthy relationship with her sister, she had the courage to overcome all the life challenges that had hit her family. The Liar’s Club has raised the world of memoirs to another new level, to say the least.

Reference

Marler, M. (2005). Memoirs of Survival: Reading the Past and Writing it Down Mary

Karr’ The Liars’ Club and Barbara Robinette Moss’ Change Me Into Zeus’ Daughter. The ALAN Review, 32(2).