Emotionally raw and viscerally honest, Liars Club is exactly what we in the 21st century expect from a memoir: a personal recollection of events from a segment of a life, told in a way that makes a complete story. That this is what we expect, is precisely because Karr virtually invented the modern memoir with this book. Highly recommended. ( )

It must have been painful for the author to write this book, the way I feel when I think about writing out certain episodes of my life, and they thus remain locked in my head.
This is about a family that lives in a small town in East Texas, close to the Louisiana border. If I thought my own family was dysfunctional, well this book makes my family look like The Sound of Music. Mama has mental illness, complicated by alcoholism, Dad is a macho who also drinks a lot. We don't find out till the ending why mama is screwed up, but it's truly a wonder that those two kids made it to adulthood.
Well-written, it glides right along, and is hard to put down because you just want to find what is the next outlandish thing to happen to this family that will make you wince. ( )

The Liars' Club by Mary Karr (1998)

I might have liked this better if I hadn't read "The Glass Castle" - just seemed too much the same although I know they are both real stories of young girls growing up in unusual circumstances. Mary Karr's mother was not suited for motherhood or the environment of eastern Texas. The writing was fine, I just couldn't particularly get into it. Did not finish (Not sure why I had this on my "later" list to read) ( )

Un espectáculo de luces en el cerebro para poder vivir perfectamente con las mentiras. O algo así, dice la autora al final de esta biografía o, mejor, historia familiar divertida, dura, a veces sórdida. Pero en fin, como la vida misma. A veces creemos que estas vidas solo son posibles en remotos pueblos de la más remota Norteamérica profunda, pero estoy segura de que contadas tan bien como lo hace esta autora, se convierten en auténticas buenas novelas.
( )