The Liars' Club

“This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.”

Karr is referring here to her mother’s frightening breakdown, which she could not remember in full for years. In not disclosing everything about this breakdown right away, she recreates the effect of her trauma—and the compelling “blank spots” that it led to—in her book. It is a narrative strategy that creates suspense, while also being faithful to her emotional experience.

“The night’s major consequences for me were internal. The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on constant vigilance against various forms of Not Rightness.”

The judgments of conservative small-town neighbors are a constant presence and pressure in Karr’s childhood. As this quote demonstrates, she internalizes these judgments, applying them not only to her parents but to herself, and carries them around even when she is alone.

“Like most people, he lied best by omission, and what he didn’t want you to know there was no point asking about.”

Karr’s father is a well-known exaggerator and spinner of tall tales, yet he is aloof and circumspect in other ways. His volubility is situational, and he tends not to like direct, difficult questions—the very sorts of questions that Karr is drawn to asking. It is worth noting that while Karr does not often challenge her father’s silence on difficult topics, she does, near the end of the memoir, challenge her mother’s. 

“Mother worshipped that kind of wild storm like nothing else.”

Karr’s mother grew up in a dry, flat area of Texas that was a stark contrast to Leechfield; therefore, storms were exotic to her and she was not frightened of them. This is one demonstration of her fearless nature and her avidity for new experience, even at the expense of safety and comfort.

“I always associate my grandmother’s house with Mother’s silence and the old woman’s endless bossy prattle.”

While Karr’s mother is portrayed as a generally impulsive and unrestrained character, her own mother has a powerful hold on her. When Karr’s mother is presented in relation to Grandma Moore, it becomes understood that her wildness out in the world is a reaction to her cowed silence in the house in which she grew up.

“It was stuff like that that’d break your heart about Leechfield, what Daddy meant when he said the town was too ugly not to love.”

Although Leechfield is an unsightly and even unhealthy place to live, its inhabitants have a dark humor about its ugliness and find creative ways to have fun—as in the Leechfield children’s bicycle “slow race” behind the DDT truck. In this way, Leechfield is the near-opposite of the Colorado mountain town where Karr and her family later briefly live, which is beautiful and fresh-aired but has very little sense of community.

“For generations my ancestors had been strapping skillets onto their oxen and walking west. It turned out to be impossible for me to ‘run away’ in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.”

The struggle that Karr faces in breaking away from her family is that her family is accustomed to upheaval and change, both psychological and geographical. What she finally must do, in order to differentiate herself from her family, is to stay with them and interrogate them about their roots, often against their will.

“Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.”

Karr is speaking here about the silence around illness and death, as well as the universality of death. Both of these things have been made clear to her by her grandmother’s illness from advanced-stage melanoma, an illness which she has seen up close.

“Lecia reasoned that we’d probably gotten away with fifty things we should have been spanked for that day, anyway, so we should just call it even.”

This is one line that shows the difference between Karr and her sister Lecia. Lecia is more inclined to get along in the world—in this case, to be philosophical about their mother’s spanking them for a minor infraction—while Karr is more concerned with justice and fairness.

“I was turning the volume down. I was hardening up inside for another tough-bucking ride.”

Karr is speaking here about her reaction to having been driven through a hurricane by her mother, a drive during which her mother seemed to have deliberately swerved the car. However, this is a frequent response of Karr’s to any number of traumatic events in her childhood. Here, she likens it to being on a rodeo horse, and at other moments, she compares it to being on a tilt-a-whirl ride. Either way, it involves a stoic clamping down of herself and a blurring of the outside world.

“She died, and I wasn’t sorry.”

Karr is unsentimental about her grandmother’s death, which does not mean that she is unaffected by it. If anything, her lack of feeling for her grandmother means that she is able to concentrate more fully on the stark fact of her death. She also sees how her grandmother’s death does affect her mother and her sister, which makes her feel estranged from them.

“I’ve plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you. At the same time, I’m more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell you the truth.”

Karr has been startled into feeling by one of her father’s Liars’ Club stories, which involves the imaginary death of his own father. Because she has her defenses down when listening to these stories—which she knows to be only stories—her reaction takes her by surprise. This is how good storytelling works, and she employs many of her father’s storytelling devices at the service of her own memoir.

“(In fights Lecia and I have as grown-ups, she’ll scream at me, ‘You were always so fucking cute!’ And I’ll scream back, ‘You were always so fucking competent!’ Which pretty much sums up our respective roles in the family.)”

This passage gets at the conflict between Karr and her sister and the degree to which their childhood has affected their adult relationship. It also illustrates their closeness and their ability to see the humor in their strife. However, their ability to understand their family dynamics does not mean that they have made peace with them, as neither one feels wholly satisfied with the role that they have been assigned.

“And that’s it, that’s what I remember about my birthday.”

Karr has blank spots in her memory around the subject of her disastrous birthday party, as she does around many difficult events in her childhood. This terse closing sentence, which ends Chapter 6, works on several levels. On one level, it is the literal truth, and on another, it is understatement, for Karr has just related a lot of dramatic and shocking events.

“If I keep my eyes unfixed and look through my eyelashes I discover I can turn the whole night into something I drew with crayon.”

Here Karr is mentally distancing herself from her mother’s psychotic breakdown. In doing so, she is likening her deliberate blurring of the confusing scene before her to the expressionistic blurring of an artist and to the type of art her mother creates.

“They had some special hookup to each other, those two, some invisible circle of understanding that they stood in together, while Daddy and I were exiled to a duller realm with which Mother had no truck.”

Karr is expressing her bewildered jealousy about her sister’s closeness to their mother. Her sense of being ‘exiled,’ however, may have given her a greater need to understand her mother and to write her book. Ironically, Karr is more like her mother in this sense than her sister is; they both have restless, artistic temperaments, which have been formed to some degree by their estrangement from their birth families.

“Finally, Mother threw a matchbook at Daddy, and he swerved off a road into a little town I’ll call Cascade, where we wound up buying a house.”

This sentence is a humorous combination of drama and jaunty understatement, swerving in the same way that the car does from a fight to the buying of a house. It gets at the Karr family’s impulsive, erratic style, and also at the blunt, clear-eyed way that a child interprets her parents’ actions.

“We both started any meal off by tossing salt over our shoulders […] And walking to school, we skipped every sidewalk crack.”

Karr and her sister’s untethered, unsupervised life in Colorado has led them to become superstitious; or to use a more clinical term, obsessive-compulsive. Lacking any sort of adult-imposed structure in their lives, they create arbitrary rules of their own.

“He’s saying I’m okay. I did good, though it’s clear down in the core of me that I’m in no way okay.”

Karr has just been molested by an adult whom she trusted, and who was supposed to tend to her. This passage shows the effects of abuse, both immediate and long-term. It shows the tendency of the victim to believe that there is something innately wrong with her, and also to seek approval from her abuser.

“For the first time, I felt the power my family’s strangeness gave us over the neighbors. Those other grown-ups were scared. Not only of my parents but of me.”

This realization marks a turning point for Karr; for the first time, she identifies herself with her own family, rather than wistfully seeking identification with her more conventional-seeming neighbors. She sees fear, and not merely judgment, in her neighbors’ regard. She views this as a fear that is probably of their own, more hidden craziness, which makes her feel powerful, rather than simply shunned and weird. While this memoir depicts many life-altering external events, it is also attentive to delicate internal shifts that are equally, if not more, important. This is one such shift.

“Mother never said that she was coming back to us that evening. Per usual, nobody said spit.”

Although the Karr family does not immediately seem like a repressed or a quiet one, in some ways it fits this description. It is a family that tends to act rather than to analyze, and that does not seem to have a vocabulary for its own dysfunction. It is also a family with many secrets, most especially around the past of Karr’s mother.  

“I left the hospital to buy a quart of malt liquor in a paper bag. I drank this fast, then watched three matinees in a row.”

Karr has inherited both of her parents’ tendencies towards alcoholism and escapism. Her father’s illness has sharpened these tendencies. She has fortunately also inherited—from both of her parents, in different ways—an artistic nature and a combative, truth-telling bent, which allow her to face down her own darkness and that of others.

“Just keeping those wounds cleaned out and dressed, and feeding Daddy, and fighting by phone and mail with the insurance company for various reimbursements kept Mother busy like I’d never seen her.”

While Karr has tended to see her mother as impulsive, indolent, and hedonistic, she also has a side to her nature that is surprisingly practical and effective. She is able to open and run a bar, for instance, and to settle down alone with her daughters in a strange Colorado town. Her husband’s illness has brought her latent practicality out and has also brought out her loyalty towards him.