The Liars' Club: A Memoir

by Karr, Mary

  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

  For Charlie Marie Moore Karr

  and J. P. Karr,

  who taught me to love

  books and stories, respectively

  We have our secrets and our needs to confess. We may remember how, in childhood, adults were able at first to look right through us, and into us, and what an accomplishment it was when we, in fear and trembling, could tell our first lie, and make, for ourselves, the discovery that we are irredeemably alone in certain respects, and know that within the territory of ourselves, there can only be our own footprints.

  —R. D. Laing,

  The Divided Self

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  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 LIARS’ CLUB

  nothing matters but the quality

  of the affection—

  in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind

  dove sta memoria

  —Ezra Pound, Canto LXXVI

  CHAPTER 1

  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.

  It took three decades for that instant to unfreeze. Neighbors and family helped me turn that one bright slide into a panorama. The bed frame tilted against the wall behind the doctor had a scary, spidery look in the dark. In one corner, the tallboy was tipped over on its back like a stranded turtle, its drawers flung around. There were heaps of spilled clothes, puzzles, comics, and the Golden Books I could count on my mom to
buy in the supermarket line if I’d stayed in the carriage. The doorway framed the enormous backlit form of Sheriff Watson, who held my sister, then nine, with one stout arm. She had her pink pajamas on and her legs wrapped around his waist. She fiddled with his badge with a concentration too intense for the actual interest such a thing might hold for her. Even at that age she was cynical about authority in any form. She was known for mocking nuns in public and sassing teachers. But I could see that she had painted a deferential look on her face. The sheriff’s cowboy hat kept the details of his expression in deep shadow, but I made out a sort of soft half-smile I’d never seen on him.

  I had a knee-jerk fear of the sheriff based on my father’s tendency to get in fights. He’d pull open the back screen with knuckles scraped and bleeding, then squat down to give instructions to me and Lecia (pronounced, she would have me tell you, “Lisa”). “If the sheriff comes by here, you just tell him you ain’t seen me in a few days.” In fact, the sheriff never came by, so my ability to straight-faced lie to the law was never tested. But just his presence that night flooded me with an odd sense: I done something wrong and here’s the sheriff. If I had, that night, possessed a voice, or if anyone nearby felt like listening, that’s what I might have said. But when you’re a kid and something big is going on, you might as well be furniture for all anybody says to you.

  It was only over time that the panorama became animate, like a scene in some movie crystal ball that whirls from a foggy blur into focus. People developed little distinct motions; then the whole scene jerked to smooth and sudden life. Sheriff Watson’s jaw dipped into the light and returned to shadow with some regularity as he said things that I couldn’t hear to my blond, suddenly cherubic-acting sister. Some firemen wearing canarycolored slickers started to move through the next room, and Dr. Boudreaux’s thick fingers came again to rub the edge of my speckled nightgown the way old ladies at the five-and-dime tested yard goods. There must have been an ambulance outside, because at intervals big triangles of red light slashed across the room. I could almost feel them moving over my face, and in the window, through a web of honeysuckle, I saw in my own backyard flames like those of a football bonfire.

  And the volume on the night began to rise. People with heavy boots stomped through the house. Somebody turned off the ambulance siren. The back screen opened and slammed. My daddy’s dog, Nipper, was growling low and making his chain clank in the yard. He was a sullen dog trained to drink beer and bite strangers. He’d been known to leap from a speeding truck’s window to chase down and fight any hound he saw. He’d killed one lady’s Chihuahua, then just shook it like a rag while Daddy tried to coax him out of her garage and she hollered and cried. When a voice I didn’t know told some sonofabitch to get out of the way, I knew it meant Nipper, who disappeared that night into the East Texas bayou—or more likely, my sister later figured out, the gas chamber at the local pound. Anyway, we never saw him again, which was okay by me. That dog had bitten me more than once.

  More door slams, the noise of boots, and some radio static from the cruiser in the road. “Come on, baby,” Dr. Boudreaux said, “show me the marks. I’m not about to hurt you.” I kept waiting to make eye contact with my sister to get some idea of how to handle this, but she was dead set on that badge.

  I don’t remember talking. I must eventually have told Dr. Boudreaux there weren’t any marks on me. There weren’t. It took a long time for me to figure that out for certain, even longer to drive my memory from that single place in time out toward the rest of my life.

  The next thing I knew, I was being led away by Sheriff Watson. He still held Lecia, who had decided to pretend that she was asleep. My eyes were belt-level with his service revolver and a small leather sap that even then must have been illegal in the state of Texas. It was shaped like an enormous black tear. I resisted the urge to touch it. Lecia kept her face in his neck the whole time, but I knew she was scudging sleep. She slept like a cat, and this was plenty of hoopla to keep her awake. The sheriff held my left hand. With my free one, I reached up and pinched her dirty ankle. Hard. She kicked out at me, then angled her foot up out of reach and snuggled back to her fake sleep on his chest.

  The highway patrolmen and firemen stood around with the blank heaviness of uninvited visitors who plan a long stay. Somebody had made a pot of coffee that laid a nutty smell over the faint chemical stink from the gasoline fire in the backyard. The men in the living room gave our party a wide berth and moved toward the kitchen.

  I knew that neither of my parents was coming. Daddy was working the graveyard shift, and the sheriff said that his deputy had driven out to the plant to try and track him down. Mother had been taken Away—he further told us—for being Nervous.

  I should explain here that in East Texas parlance the term Nervous applied with equal accuracy to anything from chronic nail-biting to full-blown psychosis. Mr. Thibideaux down the street had blown off the heads of his wife and three sons, then set his house on fire before fixing the shotgun barrel under his own jaw and using his big toe on the trigger. I used to spend Saturday nights in that house with his daughter, a junior high twirler of some popularity, and I remember nothing more of Mr. Thibideaux than that he had a crew cut and a stern manner. He was a refinery worker like Daddy, and also a deacon at First Baptist.

  I was in my twenties when Mr. Thibideaux killed his family. I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course—I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother’s front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature. It was during one of these visits that I found the Thibideauxs’ burned-out house, and also stumbled on the Greek term ate. In ancient epics, when somebody boffs a girl or slays somebody or just generally gets heated up, he can usually blame ate, a kind of raging passion, pseudo-demonic, that banishes reason. So Agamemnon, having robbed Achilles of his girlfriend, said, “I was blinded by ate and Zeus took away my understanding.” Wine can invoke ate, but only if it’s ensorcered in some way. Because the ate is supernatural, it releases the person possessed of it from any guilt for her actions. When neighbors tried to explain the whole murder-suicide of the Thibideaux clan after thirty years of grass-cutting and garbage-taking-out and dutiful church-service attendance, they did so with one adjective, which I have since traced to the Homeric idea of ate: Mr. Thibideaux was Nervous. No amount of prodding on my part produced a more elaborate explanation.

  On the night the sheriff came to our house and Mother was adjudged more or less permanently Nervous, I didn’t yet understand the word. I had only a vague tight panic in the pit of my stomach, the one you get when your parents are nowhere in sight and probably don’t even know who has a hold of you or where you’ll wind up spending the night.

  I could hear the low hum of neighbor women talking as we got near the front door. They had gathered on the far side of the ditch that ran before our house, where they stood in their nightclothes like some off-duty SWAT team waiting for orders. The sheriff let go of my hand once we were outside. From inside the tall shadow of his hat, with my sister still wrapped around him in bogus slumber, he told me to wait on the top step while he talked to the ladies. Then he went up to the women, setting in motion a series of robe-tightenings and sweater-buttonings.

  The concrete was cold on my bottom through the thin nightgown. I plucked two june bugs off the screen and tried to line them up to race down a brick, but one flew off, and the other just flipped over and waggled its legs in the air.

  At some point it dawned on me that my fate for the night was being decided by Sheriff Watson and the neighbor ladies. It was my habit at that time to bargain with God, so I imagine that I st
arted some haggling prayer about who might take us home. Don’t let it be the Smothergills, I probably prayed. They had six kids already and famously strict rules about who ate what and when. The one time we’d spent the night there, Lecia and I wound up in the bathroom eating toothpaste past midnight. We’d eaten a whole tube, for which we had been switch-whipped in the morning by a gray-faced Mr. Smothergill. He was undergoing weekly chemotherapy treatments for mouth cancer at the time, and every kid in the neighborhood had an opinion about when he would die. Cancer and death were synonymous. His sandpaper voice and bleak disposition scared us more than any whipping. His kids called him Cheerful Chuck behind his back. The oldest Smothergill daughter had been permitted to visit my house only once. (Our house was perceived as Dangerous, a consequence of Mother’s being Nervous.) She was so tickled by the idea that we could open the refrigerator at will that she melted down a whole stick of butter in a skillet and drank it from a coffee mug. Lord, I would rather eat a bug than sleep on that hard pallet at the Smothergills’. Plus in the morning the boys get up and stand around the TV in their underpants doing armpit farts. Let it be the Dillards’, and I’ll lead a holy life forever from this day. I will not spit or scratch or pinch or try to get Babby Carter to eat doo-doo. Mrs. Dillard stood with the other ladies in her pale blue zip-front duster, her arms folded across her chest. She made Pillsbury cinnamon rolls in the morning and let me squiggle on the icing. Plus her boys had to wear pajama pants when we were there. But the Dillards had space for only one of us, and that on the scratchy living room sofa. Maybe Lecia could go to the Smothergills’, I proposed to whatever God I worshiped, and I could take the Dillards. I wished Lecia no particular harm, but if there was only one banana left in the bowl, I would not hesitate to grab it and leave her to do without. I decided that if the june bug could be herded the length of a brick before I could count five I’d get what I wanted. But the june bug kept flipping and waggling before it had even gone an inch, and Mrs. Dillard went out of her way, it seemed, not to look at me.