The Liars' Club: A Memoir Download Free (EPUB, PDF)
The dazzling, prizewinning, wickedly funny tale of Mary Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood—the book that sparked a renaissance in memoirWhen it was published in 1995, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, as well as bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. Now with a new introduction that discusses her memoir’s impact on her family, 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
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (May 31, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143035746
ISBN-13: 978-0143035749
Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.6 x 7.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (423 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #1,164 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > South #14 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors #50 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Specific Groups > Women
Mary Karr had to go through hell so you could read a very cool book. That's one way to look at this opus, an exploration of the author's East Texas girlhood and the collapsing family situation she found herself confronted with.The book starts with a mystery: Why are police being called to the scene of a young girl's bed? Why is a kindly doctor inspecting her body for "marks?" The books builds a mystery, then takes more than 150 pages bothering to solve it, but by that time you are hooked too deep into the rest of the story to care. You want to find out how the most screwed up family ever to reside in the Lone Star State managed to survive themselves, albeit barely.While the author is a recognized poet and esteemed college professor, and "The Liars' Club" is widely praised among literary critics, those fearing some pointy-headed exercise in literati snobbery at the expense of slack-jawed Western yokels need not fear. Not that Karr doesn't get in some digs at the rustic Bible-thumpers responsible for so much of her upbringing, but her style of writing is much more akin to Stephen King than Margaret Mead, writing in a real-world way about actual experiences she underwent in a way that will make you feel you underwent them to, whatever your age, sex, or social background. She describes everything from hurricanes to rapes to a child's first gulp of sparkling alcohol with a "you-are-there" veracity that is almost frightening, and hard to pull away from. Only James Ellroy's "My Dark Places" and Mikal Gilmore's "Shot Through The Heart" hold a candle to this in my experience, and I've read a few.The cruelest thing one has to report about this book is, however savage the author's experience, it never stops being so goddam funny.
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