The Liar's Club : : a Memoir

Locations
Call Number: Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / General / Karr, Mary, 921 Karr, Mary
On Shelf At: Malletts Creek Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / General / Karr, Mary	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	921 Karr, Mary	4-week checkout	Due 05-14-2024

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Fiction Profile
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Great writing, but watching a train wreck submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on July 14, 2017, 10:49pm This book is about two years in the author's tremendously dysfunctional childhood, with a small coda at the end when she is 20-ish to give us some follow up.

Here's my take on it: It was probably very cathartic to write. There are a certain set of people who will read it and be deeply affirmed that there are other people who had really screwed up childhoods and can turn out OK, too ("If she did then so can I," "Wow, hers was worse than mine and I thought I had it pretty bad," etc.). But for a large part of the rest of us, this book will be read with the fascination of watching a train wreck. It's the same thing that drives the watching of so many reality shows of dysfunctional relationships that don't actually seem to grow or get better. We don't watch/read them to learn how to do it right... we are observers who can't take our eyes off watching it go wrong.

And that holds no real appeal for me.

The writing in this book is gorgeous. The author paints vivid pictures with her words and creates characters who are life-like right through the pages. That part is wonderful. But she's not teaching us. She's not educating us. There's nothing here to make us better. There's just pain and dysfunction and, for most of us, the gawking eyes of the neighbors watching.