The Liars' Club

“For a certain group of twenty-something women, consumption of, and passion for, The Liars’ Club is both a rite of passage and a mode of self-identification. . . . I am lucky I was eight when this book was published. I am lucky I grew up in a world where it colored people’s reactions to personal stories, female stories. We all are. Because The Liars’ Club is more than an account of a tattered childhood and one brave and brilliant woman’s attempt to use it rather than deny it. It is an aggressive tap on the shoulder in a crowded room, a smiling funny face asking its readers: ‘Wanna be friends?’ ” —Lena Dunham, from the Foreword

“The essential American story . . . A great pleasure to read.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Astonishing . . . one of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years . . . [Karr’s] most powerful tool is her language, which she wields with the virtuosity of both a lyric poet and an earthy, down-home Texan. It’s a wonderfully unsentimental vision.” —The New York Times

“This is what the memoir is supposed to be.” —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

“This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a backup opinion. . . . It’s like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poet’s precision of language and a poet’s insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing event.” —Molly Ivins, The Nation

“Overflows with sparkling wit and humor . . . Truth beats powerfully at the heart of this dazzling memoir.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Karr lovingly retells [her parents’] best lies and drunken extravagances with an ear for bar-stool phraseology and a winking eye for image. The revelations continue to the final page, with a misleading carelessness as seductive as any world-class liar’s.” —The New Yorker

“Karr has drawn black gold from the [Texan] mud.” —Texas Monthly

“Karr’s God-awful childhood has a calamitous appeal. The choice in the book is between howling misery and howling laughter, and the reader veers toward laughter. Karr has survived to write a drop-dead reply to the question, ‘Ma, what was it like when you were a little girl?’ ” —Time

“Mary Karr is a phoenix. That she arose from any fire to create poetry says as much about poetry as it does about Mary Karr.” —Mary-Louise Parker on her favorite memoir, The Liars’ Club, in Ladies’ Home Journal