Alaska Employment Law

Mary Karr, now a Professor of English at Syracuse University, writes memoirs.  She has written three − about her Texas childhood (The Liars’ Club), her life as an adolescent (Cherry), and her struggles with marriage, parenthood, alcoholism and religion (Lit). 

When it debuted in 1995, The Liars’ Club received such glowing reviews that some thought it set the standard for modern memoirists and had brought us into a new era of confessional writing.  Maybe it did; I missed it the first time.  When I read it recently, it reminded me not so much of other memoirs, but of the interior voices coming from young adult characters in the early Larry McMurtry novels, which are ALL about Texas – people like Danny Deck, who, if my memory is not completely shot, pops up in Moving On and All of My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers.  It’s a voice full of being young and confused, unhappy and in Texas, and it resonates here. 

The voice of Mary Karr in The Liars’ Club is not really so different from those fictional voices (McMurtry’s female characters are wonderfully drawn as a rule; perhaps he could write us a new Mary Karr), though her circumstances are.  She had a mother from hell, as near as I can tell, and a father who kept his counsel in a liquor bottle stashed in his pick-up truck – a father the young Mary adored, for all that.  Other reviewers can tell you about the delicious combination of horror and humor in The Liars’ Club, and both are there.  What makes the book work, in the end, is Karr’s ability to make her parents seem human, not monstrous – to give us insight to see why they acted as they did.  That’s her singular achievement.

Lit, on the other hand, is about making a marriage – not a bad marriage, necessarily, but not a fully thought out one – then using booze as a crutch for the trials of marriage and the loneliness of young motherhood.  Not so surprisingly after The Liars’ Club, Karr, who had two impressively alcoholic parents, becomes a drunk.  Lit is about her tentative steps back to sobriety, her grudging acceptance of what she hears from friends in AA meetings (upon reflection, I don’t recall that she ever says that she went to “Alcoholics Anonymous” or “AA” meetings, though that seems pretty obvious), and finally her struggles with prayer and redemption.  There is even a kind of reconciliation with her mother, who kicks drugs and alcohol as she ages, but is not much easier to live with.  Though Lit made the Best Books of 2009 list in the New York Times, I thought it was considerably less successful than The Liars’ Club.  While Karr’s struggles with the bottle are believably recounted, her adoption of Roman Catholicism somehow seems rushed, implausible, given what we know about her.  It may have been the right choice for her, but we don’t understand exactly why.  Lit is worth reading, but The Liars’ Club is your better bet – buckle your seat belt if that’s the one you pick.