The Liars' Club

Lecia is Karr’s older sister, and her perspective on the events of this memoir is often documented as a counterbalance to Karr’s own. More often than not, she seems to disagree with Karr, giving the impression of a sibling relationship that is close, but also combative. Even though—as Karr tells it—Lecia often had to endure the most of their mother’s erratic behavior and to act much older than she was, Lecia’s perspective on their traumatic childhood generally seems to be rosier and more simple than Karr’s own. She remembers their grandmother, for example, as a sweet, harmless old woman, while Karr remembers her as controlling and abusive. Lecia also explains away their mother’s first frightening swerve on a bridge, in Chapter 4 of the book, as a reaction to Karr’s childish nagging, rather than the halfhearted suicide attempt that Karr interprets it to have been.  

Lecia comes across as a more conventional person than Karr, and a less introspective one. Perhaps because she is so fiercely competent—better than Karr at both sports and needlepoint—she is action-oriented rather than bookish; her intelligence is worldly and pragmatic, and she does not need books to the degree that Karr does. Even when she is still and quiet, as Karr portrays her, it is more the stillness of a soldier in battle than the stillness of someone lost in thought. Remembering her sister’s stoic, resolute face during a frightening fight between their mother and their stepmother, Karr writes:“I noticed that a scary calm had fallen over Lecia’s features” (241). This is not the only time that Karr mentions Lecia’s expressions and what they signify, an attentiveness that shows the bond and the dependency between them.

Charlie Marie Karr is more usually known as Mother: the mother of Karr and Lecia. Although she is in many ways the central subject of this memoir, she is also strangely hard to see up close. She is in such constant frenzied motion that she is only revealed in pieces, often in terms of the effect that she has on other people. This effect is often disruptive, for both good and bad. Karr does not state as much outright, yet her mother seems to have had considerable glamour and sex appeal. Other than her own daughters, most of her important relations seem to have been with men. At the same time that she is good at manipulating men and getting what she wants, however, she has a destructive, anarchic streak, and a tendency to almost literally blow her own house down.

Some of this tendency can be ascribed to her character, and some of it to what has happened to her. Some of it can also perhaps be ascribed to the role that art plays in her life. She has an appreciation for beauty, and a reverence for culture and ideas: this is one of her redeeming qualities, even if it also contributes to her restlessness and resentment. Even while she is drunk and her house is a shambles around her, she is always striving to better and educate herself, reading French existentialist philosophers or studying books of painting.

Karr is closer to her father—whom she calls, more fondly and informally, Daddy—than to her mother. Leica, as Karr relates, was closer to their mother than she. At the same time, Karr shares certain underground, unvoiced similarities with their mother. They are both artists drawn to escaping their difficult upbringings and making sense of them. As female artists, they face some of the same censure and pressure to conform. As a child, Karr was also more dependent on her mother than on her father, and her mother’s difficulties affected her own life more directly. This sense of helplessness and wary closeness very much informs her portrait of her mother.

Pete Karr is Karr’s father, and a participant in the Liars’ Club meetings that give the memoir its title. It is these meetings that seem to have constituted Karr’s closest moments with her father, and also perhaps to have formed her own instincts as an artist—far more than her mother’s romantic idealizing of the artist’s life. She writes admiringly of her father’s ability, when telling a story, to create suspense and to ventriloquize other people’s voices and expressions: “No matter how tangents he took or how far the tale flew from its starting point before he reeled it back, he had this gift: he knew how to be believed […] He kept stock expressions for stock characters” (15). This same facility is displayed in Karr’s memoir, which relies both on vivid characterization and on frequent, artful digression.

Pete Karr, who is called Daddy throughout the memoir, is described from more of a distance than is Karr’s mother, which means that he is in some ways easier to see. The reader knows what he looks like, for instance—Karr describes him as having “raw good looks […] some part Indian—we never figured out which tribe—black-haired and sharp-featured” (11)—whereas about Karr’s mother the only physical description is that she had good legs and sharp green eyes. Karr’s relation to her father, unlike her relation to her mother, seems to have had certain boundaries around it, which in turn seems to have allowed for more trust and direct expressions of love. Some of these boundaries can be attributed to very traditional gender roles; Karr’s father is working-class Texan and comes from a culture in which the men stay out of the house all day and socialize mainly with other men. At the same time, Karr’s father comes across as far more tender and vulnerable than Karr’s mother—perhaps because he is less alone in the world than she is and therefore has less of a need to stay defended. He is twice shown crying in this memoir, both times about losing his wife and family. Karr explains that open weeping is commonplace among men of her father’s station: “It’s a fine trait of Texas working men that they cry” (267).