I’ve begun studying the art of memoir writing and have a great long list of memoirs to read this year, since this is the nonfiction writing I feel the most drawn to write. Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club was one of the first on my list of memoirs to study, and I’m glad I picked it first.
Karr writes with the brilliance of a poet (which, if you’ve noticed a theme in this book blog it’s that I love poetic writing). She tells her stories with great emotion and carnality, in a way that puts you right into the scene with her. She writes truth on the page, interspersed with the stories of her childhood, which serves to widen her specific experience into the shared experience of others, details aside. She is writing about humanity as much as she is writing about her family.
Karr’s story navigates through her tyrannical grandmother, her mother’s Nervous condition, the split-up of her parents, their getting back together and on into her father’s death when she was a young woman.
One of the aspects of The Liars’ Club that I enjoyed the most is that she is unashamed to say that her memory is not always the same as others in her life. It makes me trust her more, because memoirists who claim to recall everything perfectly from their earliest memory on are usually lying. But Karr’s confessional truth about relying on memory, that being a slippery thing, makes me trust her all the more with the story she tells.
Here’s how she puts it:
“When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being (missing). It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept going back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.”
This is the way of memory. We know from experience that when we try to remember those places that are too painful to remember, they seem to elude our grasp. The mind has a mysterious way of protecting itself. Sometimes we have great chunks of our lives that we cannot remember because our mind has blocked it out. But those holes are like whirlpools; we’ll always circle back to them, pulled into their depths.
At other times, Karr admits to not remembering something by admitting that her sister would tell a different story (or perhaps her sister doesn’t remember it correctly). What this serves to do is show us that we all interpret our lives in different ways. What one remembers is not necessarily what another would remember.
She writes about a birthday memory going dark on her:
“I sucked up as much air as I could get and blew the whole house dark.”
She is blowing out candles, which are keeping the house lit, and when she blows them all out, not only does the house go dark, but so does her memory.
I love the lyrical nature of Karr’s writing. Her sentences are structured beautifully, and though she is telling the true story of her life, it doesn’t feel like an autobiography. It feels like a story. It feels like a commentary on life. It feel like one great long string of what it means to be human. In one place she writes about going through a hurricane when she was just a little girl, and though I’ve never actually been through the horror of a hurricane, I felt like maybe I had. I’ve been through other hurricanes, the life kind, and it seems they’re very much alike. This is what Karr’s writing does: links a very physical detail of human existence with some emotional detail of human existence.
Her description are incredible. Here, she’s writing about a loogie her sister smeared on her:
“She hawked up a huge bogey gallop from way back in her throat, passing every now and then to tell me she was fixing to suck it at me. It had bulk and geometry. It was hanging in a giant tear right over my face, swinging side to side like a pendulum, when Daddy came slamming out the screen to haul her off me.”
This passage made me laugh out loud, not just for its gross description but also from the way it showed so perfectly this relationship between her and her sister as kids.
Here’s another great commentary on the sibling relationship (her sister has been stung by a man-of-war and has the marks down her leg):
“By the next day, she was charging neighbor kids a nickel to see her blisters, a dime to touch one, and a quarter to pop one with a straight pin we’d dunked in alcohol. Sometime during those transactions, she got mad at me and eventually got out of bed to stuff me once more into the dirty clothes hamper that pulled out from the bathroom wall. I heaved my body against the hamper to open it a slot, but the heavy lid fell back closed and mushed my fingers before I could get out. I wished her dead again, Lecia. I sat in the dark among the sandy towels and damp bathing suits for nearly an hour before she finally let me out. It seems Daddy had gone back to work, and Mother had gone to bed for the foreseeable future. There was no one else around.”
Another time, her sister told her that their mother had hauled their dead grandma in the back of their car.
“For years Lecia had me convinced that Mother left us behind because she was hauling Grandma’s body in the backseat of the Impala. Lucia fed me this lie pretty soon after we got off the phone with Mother that night, and I swallowed it like a bigmouthed bass. I needed an excuse for being left behind, I guess. The truth—that we were murder on her nerves, which were already shot—must have been too much for me.”
I love this passage for so many reasons. First, the image of swallowing what her sister told her, “like a big-mouthed bass.” She’s from Texas, and she’s slipping in a fishing reference, which is what people from Texas do. I also love her truthfulness here. She knows that she was probably too much for her mother to handle while she was trying to bury her own mother, but she felt slightly abandoned because of it.
At times, she writes irreverently, saying this of her grandmother’s death:
“I sat in the back of Uncle Frank’s white convertible going home with Lecia blubbering nonstop in the front bucket seat and him putting his hammy hand on her shoulder every now and then, telling her it was okay, to just cry it out. What was running through my head, though, was that song the Munchkins sing when Dorothy’s house lands on the witch with the stripy socks: ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead.’ I knew better than to hum it out loud, of course, particularly with Lecia making such a good show, but that’s what I thought.”
But what it really comes down to is her manner of description, how much she knows and understands about the people in her life, from this grown-up place, looking back on her childhood. Here is a description of her father. The details in this passage bring her father alive on the page:
“He had the easy glide of men who labor for an hourly wage, a walk that wastes no effort and refuses to rush. His barrel chest and legs were pale. There was a wide blood-colored scar up one shin where one of Lee Gleason’s quarter horses had thrown Daddy, then dragged him around the corral till six inches of white shinbone was visible on that leg. On the same leg, just above the knee, there was a knot of iron-blue shrapnel bulging under the skin left over from the war. Still, he didn’t limp one bit coming toward us. He had an amused squint on his face.”
And another:
“Evenings he wasn’t working, he sat in bed to study his receipts and bills. He liked to spread out the old ones stamped PAID along the left side of the bedcovers. The new statements still in their envelopes ran along the right. He’d worked out a whole ritual to handle those bills. When one hit the mailbox, he slit it open, then marked down what he owed over the front address window where his name showed through. That way he nodded at the debt right off, like he was saying, I know, I know. Plus, he then didn’t have to reopen and unfold every bill in order to worry over it. With all those envelopes staggered out in front of him, he drew hard on bottle after bottle of Lone Star beer and ciphered what he owed down the long margins of The Leechfield Gazette, all the time not saying boo about one dime of it.”
She knows the characters in her story so well. Here she is, speaking about her sister:
“I knew we’d never get back there and said as much to Lecia, who claimed that was the least of our worries. I looked at her serious profile while she watched the trees tick past. She had a way of tucking her chin in. Her head dipped down like a gull’s would facing a steep wind, so her brown eyes peered up at the world from a definite slot under her blond bangs’ sharp border. She drew her chin back further into her neck’s folds. That was her way of digging back into herself, of getting down deep in the solid foundation of what she was before another change swamped over her. Seeing her profile go all chinless in the car, I felt a whole flood of dark fill me up, cold as creek water. Daddy wouldn’t even know where to come get us when he got ready.”
In other places, the verbs make scenes come alive, like when she is describing being out in the Colorado open with her dad:
“Once the fire was high, Daddy swamped each little fish carcass around in a pie tin of cornmeal, then fried it in Crisco. I was hungry as only a day on horseback can make you. A canopy of evergreens waved overhead. Stars were bobbing into view in between. The fire kept popping to send whole handfuls of sparks skittering up in the air.”
And one day, when she is riding a horse back to the stables, after a long day out:
“The horse rocking me as he picked his way over stones had a rhythm like the Gulf, which until that night I’d never once thought of. It was a fetal rhythm, I guess, the kind that sneaks under your heartbeat and makes your brainwaves go all slack and your eyelids seam themselves together.”
One of my favorite passages was this one, a commentary on what it feels like to not have a dad:
“His kids spilled out of the truck and scattered, me hating every one of them for having a daddy. I wanted my own tall daddy to come there and make me a patch of shade with his big cool shadow.”
It’s so sad and so accurate. When you don’t have your dad around, you practically hate everyone else who does. Especially when she had a relationship like this with her dad:
“Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher’s lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.”
Mary Karr has the hand of a practiced poet in all of her stories that make up The Liars’ Club. She has written several memoirs, and they have now joined my to-read list.
