Imagine you are a child of 7 and this is your sharpest memory: "Our family doctor knelt before me where I sat on a mattress on the bare floor. . . . He was pulling at the hem of my favorite nightgown. . . . 'Show me the marks,' he said. 'Come on, now. I won't hurt you.' "
Thus opens "The Liars' Club," Mary Karr's haunting memoir of growing up in East Texas in the early 1960's, virtually motherless, and fiercely seeking to understand her parents, their lives and their relationship to her sister and herself.
Daddy drank every day, but "he never missed a day of work in 42 years at the plant; never cried -- on the morning after -- that he felt some ax wedged in his forehead; never drew his belt from his pant loops to strap on us or got weepy over cowboy songs the way some guys down at the Legion did." Mother was a different story. "Looking back from this distance, I can also see Mother trapped in some way, stranded in her own silence. How small she seems in her silk dress, drinking stale coffee."
A reader could conclude that no one speaks in this memoir except the narrator, and that would be almost true. But even mute, this mother is the story; give or take a few exceptions, she's the whole story. Charlie Marie Moore Karr, a k a Mother, is a huge enigma that by her very presence, her silent, raging sadness and fierce passions dominates the family. She is an enigma not only to her daughters and husband, but to the set of children whom she abandoned years before giving birth to Mary and her older sister, Lecia, and whose existence she has held as a corrosive secret. And she has remained an enigma to everyone, including the six men she has married and divorced, even Daddy, J. P. Karr, whom she married twice.
The Liars' Club turns out to be just a place where the men meet on their days off to play dominoes and drink in the back room of the bait shop. Mary Karr's father is mainly just a regular guy. It is her mother who takes on enormous, suffocating dimension.
As Mother rarely speaks, it is left to the imagination of the daughters to attempt to translate her silences. While Daddy, who works in the oilfields of Leechfield, where Agent Orange is manufactured, has a sweet steady Texas grit, Mother has what her daughter calls East Coast longings. She is too refined for Texas, and is "adjudged more or less permanently Nervous." Born in West Texas, she had gone to New York, where she spent her youth and first marriages and went to the opera and to museums. Back in East Texas, she reads Camus and Sartre and tries to throw herself out of speeding cars while drunk.
In Mary's eyes, the most admirable thing about Charlie is that she's a painter. Daddy and his card-playing buddies in the Liars' Club build her a studio in the back of their house, and the first thing she paints on her visits home from caring for her own mother is "a portrait of Grandma . . . from a Polaroid taken just before Grandma lost the leg."
Shortly before the major catastrophe that's about to happen to these girls, Ms. Karr notes, "I see Mother's face wearing that thousand-yard stare. . . . The back door she's staring through opens on a wet black night." Charlie is immeasurably, palpably sad. Her art, in the end, is not enough to hold her -- nor is any art. She just reads Tolstoy, plays old Bessie Smith records and cries.
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Thus opens "The Liars' Club," Mary Karr's haunting memoir of growing up in East Texas in the early 1960's, virtually motherless, and fiercely seeking to understand her parents, their lives and their relationship to her sister and herself.Daddy drank every day, but "he never missed a day of work in 42 years at the plant; never cried -- on the morning after -- that he felt some ax wedged in his forehead; never drew his belt from his pant loops to strap on us or got weepy over cowboy songs the way some guys down at the Legion did." Mother was a different story. "Looking back from this distance, I can also see Mother trapped in some way, stranded in her own silence. How small she seems in her silk dress, drinking stale coffee."
A reader could conclude that no one speaks in this memoir except the narrator, and that would be almost true. But even mute, this mother is the story; give or take a few exceptions, she's the whole story. Charlie Marie Moore Karr, a k a Mother, is a huge enigma that by her very presence, her silent, raging sadness and fierce passions dominates the family. She is an enigma not only to her daughters and husband, but to the set of children whom she abandoned years before giving birth to Mary and her older sister, Lecia, and whose existence she has held as a corrosive secret. And she has remained an enigma to everyone, including the six men she has married and divorced, even Daddy, J. P. Karr, whom she married twice.
The Liars' Club turns out to be just a place where the men meet on their days off to play dominoes and drink in the back room of the bait shop. Mary Karr's father is mainly just a regular guy. It is her mother who takes on enormous, suffocating dimension.
As Mother rarely speaks, it is left to the imagination of the daughters to attempt to translate her silences. While Daddy, who works in the oilfields of Leechfield, where Agent Orange is manufactured, has a sweet steady Texas grit, Mother has what her daughter calls East Coast longings. She is too refined for Texas, and is "adjudged more or less permanently Nervous." Born in West Texas, she had gone to New York, where she spent her youth and first marriages and went to the opera and to museums. Back in East Texas, she reads Camus and Sartre and tries to throw herself out of speeding cars while drunk.
In Mary's eyes, the most admirable thing about Charlie is that she's a painter. Daddy and his card-playing buddies in the Liars' Club build her a studio in the back of their house, and the first thing she paints on her visits home from caring for her own mother is "a portrait of Grandma . . . from a Polaroid taken just before Grandma lost the leg."
Shortly before the major catastrophe that's about to happen to these girls, Ms. Karr notes, "I see Mother's face wearing that thousand-yard stare. . . . The back door she's staring through opens on a wet black night." Charlie is immeasurably, palpably sad. Her art, in the end, is not enough to hold her -- nor is any art. She just reads Tolstoy, plays old Bessie Smith records and cries.
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