The Liars' Club
Mary Karr's account of her east Texas childhood opens on the night she turned seven and a sheriff arrived at the family door, and from there it widens into a portrait of one of the strangest, most dangerous, and funniest American families ever set down on paper. Her father, Pete, holds court at the local oil refinery's namesake bar, telling stories with a precision that makes them truer than the truth. Her mother, Charlie, is brilliant, beautiful, secretly married seven times, and given to episodes of violent breakdown. Between them and her older sister Lecia, Mary learns to read the weather of adults and to find words for what she sees. The book moves through tornadoes, a near-fatal assault, a parental separation, and the slow uncovering of family secrets, all rendered in prose that helped reinvent the American memoir. First published in 1995, it remains a landmark of the form and a love letter to a family that almost destroyed her.
Where The Liars' Club keeps showing up
Three of our editors' lists feature this novel.
Books in conversation with The Liars' Club
A few of the closest reads from our full list.
What you might want to know about The Liars' Club
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Poet Mary Karr remembers her 1960s childhood in the East Texas oil town of Leechfield, between an oil refinery father who told stories with his Liars' Club and a beautiful, often violent mother with seven secret marriages. The memoir circles two years that almost broke her family.
Yes. The Liars' Club (1995) is Mary Karr's memoir of her East Texas childhood. It helped launch the modern memoir boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, alongside Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.
Yes. Mary Karr wrote Cherry (2000) and Lit (2009), forming a memoir trilogy. She also wrote The Art of Memoir (2015) about the craft of writing memoir.
The Liars' Club was written by Mary Karr, published in 1995 by Wheeler Pub..
The Liars' Club is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Liars' Club takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Liars' Club is a standalone novel by Mary Karr, not part of a series.
The Liars' Club is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
