The Liars' Club: A Memoir (2 page)

Lecia didn’t miss a beat, saying, “Mother, isn’t that where you shot at daddy?”

And Mother squinted up, slid her glasses down her patrician-looking nose and said, very blasé, “No that’s where I shot at Larry.” She wheeled to point at another wall, adding, “Over there’s where I shot at your daddy.”

Which tells you first off why I chose to write
The Liars’ Club
as memoir instead of fiction: when fortune hands you such characters, why bother to make stuff up? It also clues you in to Mother’s outlaw nature, and the degree to which—being long sober before she died—she’d accepted the jackpots of her past without much attendant shame.

I’d forewarned Mother and my sister Lecia about the events I planned to parade down the page, and from the git-go Mother said, “Hell, get it off your chest.… If I gave a damn what anybody thought, I’d have been baking cookies and going to PTA.” Lecia—a more circumspect spirit—also cheered me on, since I needed money for a car so desperately (being a single mom in Syracuse, New York, where bus service is spare and snowfall measurable in yards). Needing money is a supremely noble cause among our ilk,
but Lecia would have backed any project I’d taken on. (“Going on a murder spree. Good, lotta bastards need killing.”)

The surprise bonus came after
Liars’ Club
(and later, its sister
Cherry
) became public: as taboos on former subjects vaporized in my family, the level of candor in my clan got jacked way up. There was no need to scudge anymore about Mother’s past propensity to get drunk and openly wag firearms, or the number of times she’d married (seven—twice to my Texas oil worker daddy).

As certain facts that had once scalded all our insides and almost decimated our clan got broadcast a thousand times, we got oddly used to them. Call it aversion therapy, but the events seeped in a little deeper. We healed more—though that had never been the point—through exposure. Our distant catastrophes became somehow manageable. Catharsis, the Greeks call it.

To wit: A cheerful morning talk show host in Houston, where my Republican sister had a massive insurance business, once turned to me on camera and said (in the chirpy tone designed to get a raisin cake recipe), “What is it like to have your mother try to kill you with a butcher knife?” The glossy smile might have stayed forever shining from her lipsticked mouth as she waited for me to concoct an appropriately chirpy answer had not my sister—sitting just off the set—shouted in, “It’s a big old fucking bummer.” So I broke up, then the camera guys bent over double, and the whole taping had to start over.

In pages to come, you’ll witness the awful burden strapped to Lecia’s back from grade school onward as she schemed to prevent our combustible mother from completely flaming out. About age eleven, Lecia had not only figured out a stick shift, she could talk the average highway patrolman out of giving her a ticket by arguing she’d left her license at home:
Officer, sir, I’m rushing my baby sister home to our momma cause her fever’s just scorching my hand, poor little dumpling.
My job was usually looking doleful. (I’ve mentioned before that when my big sister pens her memoir, I will always appear either throwing up or wetting my pants or sobbing.)

However personal such stories are at my core, they’ve somehow ceased to be my business, since I’m no longer—after ten years—the
person who wrote
Liars’ Club.
To promote a book so long after it’s in print makes you—according to novelist Ian McEwan—an employee of your former self. Other than reading the occasional excerpt on request, I haven’t cracked the book’s spine since I recorded the audio, have no desire to do so.

I do, however, continue to receive from it the shiniest of gems: readers who get it. As I’m signing books after a lecture, somebody always stays till the end to pull me aside, and while the auditorium is being swept out around us, I hear a stranger’s unlikely family saga. I’m chosen for such a confidence because people think I’ll empathize, and it’s not hyperbolic to claim I always do.

But I’d set out on the road the first time with soul-sucking dread, fearing that the people I loved most in the world would be bantered about as grotesques, myself pitied as some Dickensian orphan. The opposite happened. In towns across the country, readers of every class and stripe confided about childhoods that certainly differed from mine in terms of surface pyrotechnics—fires set and fortunes squandered. But the feelings were identical. As I went from town to town, I felt a community assembling around me.

Even the most perfect-looking clan sailed through a rough patch. “I’m from one of those Donna Reed households you always wanted to adopt you,” the elegant woman in Chicago said. But her doctor daddy got saddled with a wicked malpractice suit. A few more martinis than usual got poured from the silver shaker every night. Rumor was he took up with his nurse.

What happened? I was riveted.

“We worked it out,” she said. “It passed.” But not before his Cadillac plowed over her bicycle one drunken night and her mother threatened divorce. Like me, she’d lain awake and felt the metaphorical foundations of her family shake as her parents roared around in the masks of monsters.

Not everybody I met reported such chaotic times as mere blips in the family timeline. One guy’s drug dealer parents dragged him across many borders with bags of heroin taped under his Dr. Denton’s. Another woman had, at age five, watched her alcoholic
mother hang herself while the girl fought to shield her toddler brother’s eyes.

These stories exploded the myth that such turbulent family dramas condemn you to a life curled up in the back ward of a mental institution. Most of these folks seemed—on the surface at least—to have gotten over their troubled upbringings without blocking them out.

The female therapist in a Portland bookstore talked specifically about the power of narrative in her life. She’d been raised by a chronic schizophrenic, her school clothes selected by God himself instructing her mom from the radio. The girl got adept (as I had) at worming her way into other people’s houses. In college she fought depression with therapy. At fifty, she wore a Burberry raincoat and was happily married with grown kids. Plus she was in close touch with her own mother, whose mood swings had gotten better with new medications and the lessening of stress that old age brought.

The lady in Chicago survived, she told me, through stories. Which is at the core of traditional therapy: retelling the family saga. Talk about it, the old wisdom says, and you get better. From narratives about childhood, this woman manufactured a self, neither cut off from her past nor mired in it.

In our solitary longing for some reassurance that we’re behaving okay inside fairly isolated families, personal experience has the possibility to transform both the tellers of it and the listeners to it. Just as the novel form once took up experiences of urban industrialized society that weren’t being addressed in sermons or epistles or epic poems, so memoir—with its single, intensely personal voice—wrestles with family issues in a way readers of late find compelling. The good ones confirm my experience in a flawed family. They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh.

According to other writers in my own informal poll,
Liars’ Club
—and
Cherry
—are documentably odd not so much in the boatload of mail they generated (the bestseller’s blessing/curse),
but in the length and intensity of letters. At the peak of the first book’s selling cycle, when it hovered at number two on
The New York Times
bestseller list for months (no, it never made number one), I got four hundred to five hundred letters a week, now dwindled to between twenty and sixty per year based on Lord knows what.

How many of those letters began, “I’ve never told anybody this, but…”? I didn’t count. A bunch.

Okay, there were a lot of jailhouse marriage proposals—felons who would let me ghostwrite their riveting story of unjust incarceration while they held out the possible bonus of conjugal visits. But most letters came from average people pouring out tales of their kin in lengthy missives. I got other folks’ school photos and news clippings and death announcements, even (in one case) a Xeroxed order of protection. Many psychiatrists wrote to claim they’d given my book to clients and found it useful for therapy about childhood sexual abuse, alcoholism, and early trauma.

Reading
Liars’ Club
seemed to crowbar open something in people. “Your book just dredged up so many memories…” Or, “After reading
Liars’ Club
, my brother and I have reconciled…” Or, “I’ve been writing down some of what we went through when my father came back from Vietnam…” Or, “I never knew how my mother’s cancer death has kept rotting inside me…”

This is a writer’s dream response, what I’d hankered for as a kid setting crayon to cardboard on Mother’s Day—to plug a reader into some wall outlet deep in the personal psychic machine that might jumpstart him or her into a more feeling way of life.

Last week, in a midtown deli in Manhattan, I got blindsided by what we in my family call a
Liars’ Club
moment. I’d just swapped names with some new acquaintances after yoga class when the subject of memoir cropped up. One woman stopped using the mustard knife mid-smear and turned to me all keyed up. “You should read
The Liars’ Club
by Mary Karr.” She was a big-deal Broadway actress, and her face had all the zeal of an infomercial maestro.

I said, I
am
Mary Karr.

At which point, she burst into tears, saying sorry and dabbing under her eyes with a napkin. “Your book changed my life,” she said.

Maybe this sounds like a lot of bragging and big talk, but it’s a common enough phenomenon to warrant mention. So many readers have started crying when they meet me that I used to bring a box of tissues to book signings. I even cooked up a tensionbreaking joke about being such a disappointment in person. And when somebody said (as this woman did) that her psychiatrist had given her the book, I suggested she sue for malpractice as the book renders no champions of mental health. On the way out of the restaurant, the actress slipped me her card. “I have a lot of stories to tell you.” she said.

Her stories will no doubt reconfirm the only sliver of irrefutable wisdom on the subject of kin
The Liars’ Club
’s odyssey has taught me, now oft-repeated: a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. In other words, the boat I can feel so lonely in actually holds us all.

If
The Liars’ Club
began as a love letter to my less-than-perfect clan, it spawned (on its own terms) love letters from the world. Its publication constructed for me—in midlife, unexpectedly—what I’d hankered so desperately for as a dreamy kid comforted only by reading: that mythic village of like-minded souls who bloom together by sharing old tales—the kind that fire you up and set you loose, the true kind. So come on in.

Mary Karr

Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature
Syracuse University

December 2004

Amanda Urban, my agent at ICM, first urged me to write the proposal for this book. Nan Graham subsequently bought it for Viking. Her work as editor and dear friend and passionate enthusiast proved invaluable. Ditto for Courtney Hodell, also of Viking. My sister, Lecia Harmon Scaglione, confirmed the veracity of what I’d written. James Laughlin of New Directions also gave me a needed boost. As final readers, Tobias and Catherine Wolff worked quickly and incisively and without recompense. For all these, I’m grateful.

Thanks also to the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation for a muchneeded Writers Award, and to the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College for a fellowship.

My mother didn’t read this book until it was complete. However, for two years she freely answered questions by phone and mail, and she did research for me, even when she was ill. She has been unreserved in her encouragement of this work, though much in the story pains her. Her bravery in this is laudable. Her support means everything.

THE
L
IARS’
C
LUB

My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark. I was seven, and our family doctor knelt before me where I sat on a mattress on the bare floor. He wore a yellow golf shirt unbuttoned so that sprouts of hair showed in a V shape on his chest. I had never seen him in anything but a white starched shirt and a gray tie. The change unnerved me. He was pulling at the hem of my favorite nightgown—a pattern of Texas bluebonnets bunched into nosegays tied with ribbon against a field of nappy white cotton. I had tucked my knees under it to make a tent. He could easily have yanked the thing over my head with one motion, but something made him gentle. “Show me the marks,” he said. “Come on, now. I won’t hurt you.” He had watery blue eyes behind thick glasses, and a mustache that looked like a caterpillar. “Please? Just pull this up and show me where it hurts,” he said. He held a piece of hem between thumb and forefinger. I wasn’t crying and don’t remember any pain, but he talked to me in that begging voice he used when he had a long needle hidden behind his back. I liked him but didn’t much trust him. The room I shared with my sister was dark, but I didn’t fancy hiking my gown up with strangers milling around in the living room.