45 pages • 1 hour read
Mary KarrThe Liars' Club
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: "Texas Again, 1980"
Chapter 14 Summary
This chapter jumps ahead 17 years from the time of the last chapter. Karr is an adult and has left home—first to go to college in Minnesota and then to live in Boston—and her father has had a stroke. She goes back home to Texas to tend to him and to help out her mother, who will stay with Karr’s father for the rest of his life.
She remembers visiting her father at the Legion, while she was home on a break from college. This visit, during which they played pool and Karr witnessed her father get into a drunken fight with another patron, marked one of the last times that Karr accompanied her father to his male-dominated enclaves. She also relates that she stopped going to Liars’ Club meetings once she became an adolescent, and her father’s friends began to treat her differently, as an awkward female interloper. A new distance opened up between Karr and her father after these changes: “[O]ver the years, Daddy and I became abstract to each other” (286).
Karr remembers trying to get her father to stop drinking, but making no progress. He simply tells her that he doesn’t care whether drinking is destroying his health or not, and she is frightened by the flat, resigned look in his eyes: “He was unknown to me, and unknowable, though I sensed inside him during that time a darkness so large and terrible that perhaps his last gift to me was trying to shield me from it, and his last failure was that he couldn’t entirely do so” (291).
He ends up having a stroke while sitting at the Legion bar. Karr visits him in the hospital, where her mother is already sitting outside his room. Karr visits with her father, attempting to talk to him and to get him to talk, then drives her mother home, both of them crying. In their driveway, Karr accidentally hits Bumpers, Karr’s father’s beloved cat, who has already seen a great deal of trauma. When they take him to the vet the following day, the vet is optimistic about his chances of recovery.
Chapter 15 Summary
Karr tends to her father in the hospital. He has lucid spells, and also moments of disturbing meanness, during which he rails at Karr and her sister for abandoning him and going away to fancy schools. One day Karr and her mother watch a television program about World War II, and seeing the program seems to partially revive Karr’s father. However, he remains unable to form coherent sentences on any subject other than the war.
Karr’s father returns home from the hospital; Karr’s mother is told by Dr. Boudreaux that the insurance from the oil refinery will no longer cover his care. Karr and her mother and sister struggle to care for him and to find ways to pay for his medical bills. Karr tries hard to see her bedsore-covered, incontinent father as the man he once was: “I wanted to treat him with dignity—needed to do so, even—but his circumstances defied the only forms of dignity I knew” (302).
One day, in an attempt to summon up her old father, Karr listens with him to a tape of one of his old Liars’ Club stories: a violent story of revenge. Shortly afterwards, Colonel Pierce, Karr’s father’s old commanding officer, visits the family. The presence of Pierce again rouses Karr’s father to something approaching lucidity, and afterwards Pierce tells stories about Karr’s father during wartime that Karr has never heard before: “Once, a German soldier stuck a bayonet through his forearm, leaving a scar I’d seen a thousand times and never once asked about” (309). Pierce also tells the family that if they can prove that Karr’s father’s stroke came from an old army head wound, the army might be able to help with his medical costs.
Karr goes into the family attic, to look for some papers regarding her father’s army wounds. Instead, she comes upon some startling old baggage of her mother’s. Opening a random box, she finds her grandmother’s prosthetic leg—a sight which stuns and frightens her—and also a couple of old wedding rings, which she deduces belonged to her mother.
Karr pesters her mother to tell her the whole story about her past—as her therapist has encouraged her to do so—and eventually takes her mother out for margaritas to get her to talk. Her mother tells her about her teenaged marriage, which took her out of Texas and to New York City, and her first two children, Tex and Belinda (not their real names), whom she lost. While she was gone at work, her husband, together with his visiting mother, took the children and disappeared. Karr’s mother tells her that this sudden disappearance of her family marked the time when she began to drink seriously. She eventually tracked the children down in a Nevada town, by which time their father had remarried and the children wanted nothing to do with her. She ended up waiving custody rights, convinced that the children would have a more stable life with her father. She then regretted this decision and repeatedly married, hoping that each new husband would provide her with a stable environment of her own, to which her children might want to return.
Karr’s mother locates the source of her psychotic breakdown in her first two children’s disappearance: “Those were my mother’s demons, then, two small children, whom she longed for and felt ashamed of having lost” (320). The confession leaves both Karr and her mother weeping, drunk and thoroughly disoriented. Looking back on their meeting, however, Karr locates grace in it. She likens the grace found in difficult stories to the bright white tunnels that people on the verge of death are said to see. She also relates that her father will go on to live for five more years after his stroke.
Part 3 Analysis
For not immediately obvious reasons, these last chapters jump seventeen years ahead in time. In many ways, they at first feel like a coda to the book. At the time of these chapters, Karr and Lecia have both left home and established independent adult lives: Karr has become a poet in Boston, while Lecia has settled down with her husband on a large Texas farm. They are therefore less at the mercy of their parents and are in a position to care for them, in all ways. Most significantly, Karr’s father—who has been a background presence throughout most of the book—comes to the foreground here, albeit as an infirm, elderly man. Karr describes the effort to care for him after he has suffered a stroke and focuses more on their relationship, past and present, than she has in the previous chapters. She writes not only about their closeness and their sharing of rituals like the Liars’ Club, but also about the distances between them, distances which have much to do with her gender. Remembering how her role at the Liars’ Club changed once she became an adolescent girl, she writes: “Daddy couldn’t stand my growing up, specifically since I grew up female” (280).
Karr’s father after his stroke is in many ways an intensified version of himself, and Karr’s efforts to care for and communicate with him are exaggerated versions of challenges that he and she have always had, in their relationship. Karr’s father has always been portrayed as a loving, steady but also somewhat volatile and unknowable man. His and Karr’s communication has always fallen within certain strict boundaries—mainly those of the Liars’ Club meetings—and their relationship has had as much to do with silences and tacit understandings as it has with voluble talk. While nowhere near as erratic as Karr’s mother, moreover, Karr’s father has been prone to outbursts of temper and even violence; he has also been, like Karr’s mother, a heavy drinker. Both his taciturnity and his hurtful temper are on display after he has had a stroke, and both are very much aimed at Karr. She must cope with his furious disparagement of her higher education—an outburst which reduces her to tears—and she also must literally try to get him to talk since he has lost the ability to form coherent words and sentences. The subject that rouses him to something like lucidity is most reliably World War II, in which he fought as a young man, yet he is also fitfully lucid at other times. This combination of predictability and unpredictability also seems innate to his character, even if his stroke has given it a different form.
Meanwhile, Karr’s mother is largely a background presence in these final chapters. She comes across as still herself, but also as slightly muted and domesticated. While she has had the whole stage to herself in previous chapters, here she is seen mostly in relation to Karr’s father: fighting with insurance companies, waiting outside of Karr’s father’s hospital room, crying while driving home from the hospital. However, it is as if she can be muffled for only so long, even in her harmless old age, and in this book’s final pages she takes over once again. What she reveals to Karr about her past, moreover, puts much of her previous behavior—and therefore her personality—in a slightly different light. Her compulsive acquiring of husbands is seen to be a craving for stability, rather than mere fecklessness and escapism, and her violent outbursts are seen to have their roots in sorrow and loss: a loss that goes well beyond the loss of her aged mother. While she herself has portrayed her time in New York City as a glamorous, giddy period in her life, it is now evident that this was not the case at all. This in turn allows the reader to see her as something more than a frivolous dilettante and more so as a tenacious woman.
In this sense, the memoir’s ending seems at first to be a surprise ending. At the same time, this quality of surprise and upheaval has been a constant in the book, as has the dominance of Karr’s mother. This revelation about her past can be viewed as simply her latest surprise, implying that change and upheaval are the Karr family’s own version of stability.
