What would you do if you had to grow up in a town full of lies, violence and madness? Thats the question Mary Karr asks in her acclaimed memoir The Liars Club, published in 1995 and winning the PEN/Martha Albrand award.

The Liars Club is the story of Karrs childhood in the 1960s in a small industrial town in southeast Texas, where his father worked at an oil refinery and his mother was an impulsive, restless, and charismatic woman who suffered frequent seizures. of anger and compulsion. Karr and her older sister Lecia had to deal with a chaotic family life and the dark secrets of their past.

The book begins with the outcome of Karrs mothers violent psychotic breakdown, which occurred when she was 7 and Lecia was 9. Karr and her sister are at her house at night, her parents absent. ; Karr knows that her father is still at her job and that her mother has been taken away in an ambulance. A doctor examines Karr for marks she now knows werent there, while Lecia, outside the house, pretends to sleep in the arms of the local sheriff. There are also several neighbors watching outside, and Karr understands that she and Lecia will have to spend the night with one of them. Karr claims that she has no recollection of which neighbor they stayed with that night. He also states that although he now remembers everything that happened to them that night, it took him much of his adult life to do so, and that he is not going to tell the whole story of that night right away: Since it took me so long to piece together what happened Ill leave that part of the story missing for a while.


The Liars Club is a book that grabs you from the first page with its vivid and authentic language, its acid humor and its brutal honesty. It is a testimony of how a girl manages to survive and grow in the midst of chaos and pain, without losing hope or love for life. It is a masterpiece of the memoir genre that will not leave you indifferent.

If you want to read a powerful and true story about childhood, trauma and family, check out Mary Karrs The Liars Club. We guarantee that you will not be able to put it down until the end.