Where do I begin?

Mary Karr’s writing is a thing of beauty, even when she describes harrowing experiences from her childhood, in this remarkable memoir The Liars’ Club (1995).

Most of the book focuses on Karr’s memories from the first ten years of her life, growing up during the 1960’s, in a family where she rarely felt safe or secure. Her mother was volatile at best, neglectful at worst, and seemingly had a closet stuffed full of secrets which were always just beyond Karr’s reach.

Her dad, meanwhile, was a salt-of-the-earth, blue-collar worker employed by one of the Texas oil refineries, who regularly held court with his buddies to drink and tell tall tales (the liar’s club of the title).

Both her parents were alcoholics, which had a huge impact on Karr’s childhood. In this extract, Karr details the time, when she was around eight-years-old, her mother served her red wine mixed with 7UP:

I’d heard her tell a hundred times how the monk who discovered champagne had likened it to drinking stars. Suddenly, that made sense. The wine and the sparkly soda se my mouth tingling. I thought right off, Drinking stars. Whole galaxies could have been taking shape in there, for the taste was vast and particular at once. I’d taken too little a sip, though, and had to have another one to see if the same small explosion happened. It did. I drank down some more. Besides its tasting good, the wine seemed to go down deep in me, not burning like it had before, but with a slow warmth. A few more sips set that warmth loose and rolling down my limbs. I actually felt a light in my arms and legs where the alcohol was spreading. Something like a big sunflower was opening at the very centre of my being, which image I must have read in a poem somewhere, for it came to me whole that way.

The book is full of vivid and beautiful descriptions like the one above, despite Karr living through some devasting experiences.

Highly recommended.

(Trigger warnings: this memoir contains child abuse, sexual abuse, addiction).