Memory Unstuck and Blooming

The Liar’s Club, by Mary Karr

Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club is a feat of memory unstuck and blooming. The crude unspooling of time is a dull fact, but Karr counter-intuitively packs a fascinating density into her first book by zeroing in on the events of a mere three years of her childhood spent between Texas and Colorado. In Karr’s hands that period has an epic sprawl as a series of ruthless traumas rivet those early years spent in the swampy backwaters of East Texas. At its core, the book is a family odyssey, what Karr has described as “a love-letter to my less-than-perfect clan,” but the book defies sentimentality thanks to Karr’s blunt humor and keen sense-memory (the precision of which can occasionally strain credulity). The story weaves together composite descriptions of the chemical-scarred landscape of East Texas with lucid scenes of familial strife that are at once charming and horrifying.

But what also offsets both the horror and sentimentality that memoir is prone to is Karr’s acknowledgment of the suffering that surrounds her own. After detailing her mother’s near-lethal psychotic break and subsequent institutionalization, for example, Karr decides to linger on the suicide of a neighbor, Bugsy Juarez. Or rather, she lingers on the image of his wife’s handprint on the kitchen table—her hands had been caked in flour from making biscuits when Bugsy shot himself. It’s an image of domesticity interrupted and has a terrifyingly banal resonance to the threat Karr’s own parents posed.

Which of course points to the sheer craft of the thing which somehow manages to exceed the grimly compelling content of her early life’s story. Karr doesn’t play favorites with her senses—you can smell the ripe stench of the petroleum refineries wafting from these pages and by book’s end you could wring them to fill a flask with Jack Daniel’s. Perhaps this is the specificity wrought by trauma, but when she moves into the book’s most important moments the wealth of detail hits you with a brute force.

This is as much a matter of memory as it is technical expertise, something Karr openly struggles with throughout the book. There’s a constant push and pull between the forcefulness of her sense-memories and the plain veracity which they might contradict. In the opening pages she details a game she played to distract herself from the swarm of police and the absence of her parents:

I plucked two June bugs off the screen and tried to line them up to race down a brick, but one flew off, and the other just flipped over and waggled its legs in the air

A page later, however, she surrenders to the limits of her memory and the perhaps more significant details that have left her:

I don’t remember who got farmed out to who or for how long…Some memory endures of a screened-in breezeway with green slatted blinds all around…But the faces of my hosts in that place…refuse to conjured.

The explicitness of this struggle on the page actually bolsters her credibility, reminding us that the impression of the memory is just as, if not more, important as any details that could potentially be verified.

In fact, it’s this very back-and-forth that, in the hands of a lesser writer, may have bogged down the book in hand-wringing and uncertainty. There’s no denying that Karr is prone to editorializing in this book, such as when she interjects as to why she leaves out the ending of a memory or when her sister’s perspective intrudes on the scene. Generally such waffling undermines the already tenuous authority any writer has over their text, but in this instance, Karr settles into a kind of groove, incorporating a wealth of viewpoints—not just her childhood memory’s but hers as an adult, her sister’s, etc—as a matter of style such that the book begins to feel like a dazzling chimera of perspective. Indeed, the book ends on yet another acknowledgment of this dynamic. After getting blitzed with her mother at Mexican restaurant and finally wrenching forth a confession of her early years and lost children, Karr writes as they drive away that

I didn’t think this particularly beautiful or noteworthy at the time, but only do so now. The sunset we drove into that day ways luminous, glowing; we weren’t…It’s only looking back that I believe the clear light of truth should have filled us…Maybe such reports are just death’s neurological fireworks, the brain’s last light show. If so, that’s a lie I can live with…the image pleases me enough.

Karr reminds us that what we value about the thing that gets called “truth” has more to do with affect than with verisimilitude. It can be retroactive, constructed, perhaps even (counterintuitively, heretically) false or misleading. But, at least in this case, truth is defused of its preciousness and gets to exist on the same plane as pleasure and despair. Thus Karr leaves us with a moment that brims with the affect of truth (in the sense of confession and communication, narrative and storytelling) while still nodding toward the unresolved tension of the lies that propelled her writing in the first place.