The Liars' Club

As the title of this memoir suggests, storytelling plays a central role in Karr’s childhood, and one that has as much to do with falsehood as with truth-telling. In the case of her father’s Liars’ Club meeting, these falsehoods are straightforward and literal. Her father often exaggerates and even outright lies in telling his stories, and he is regularly met with skepticism and back talk by his cronies. Within this flagrant lying, however, there is a sort of honesty and openness. Karr’s father seems to scarcely expect that his stories will be believed, and there is a ritual, ceremonial quality to his friends’ constant challenging of his stories, as there is to the meetings themselves. Moreover, while his stories seem usually not to be literally true, there is often an emotional truth buried in them: one that these men are perhaps too shy or too tradition-bound to acknowledge otherwise.

His story about his own father, for instance—in which he claims that his father is dead, through a preposterous accidental hanging—affects Karr deeply, even though she knows her paternal grandfather to be still alive. Her own grandmother has recently died, after a long, gruesome illness, and she is haunted by the randomness and suddenness of death. Her very dislike of her grandmother and her consequent lack of mourning for her seems only to have made her see the blunt fact of her death more starkly. Although Karr knows that she is breaking a certain masculine code in doing so, she cannot stop herself from asking her father what happens when people die. Her father then answers, with an unusual flatness and directness—a directness that his own tall tale seems to have led him to—“I know what happens when you die […] Done seen what happens. You lay down in a box, and they throw some dirt on you” (125). It is striking that he does not attempt to console his daughter here and appears to be talking as much to himself as to her.

Karr nevertheless prefers this directness to the stories that are passed around by many of the Baptists in her Texas town. Her question about death stirs up tension among the men at the Liars’ Club partly because they know that it will make Ben, who is a Baptist and often teased about it, self-conscious. Ben believes, as do many of Karr’s classmates, in a heavenly afterlife. Karr’s Baptist classmates also believe, for example, that the hurricane that is projected to destroy their town—and that instead destroys a nearby Louisiana town—is a sign of God’s judgment. Karr is bothered by these stories, partly because of this very sense of judgment behind them. She knows that these same God-fearing neighbors often pass judgment on her own family, while also refusing to intervene when her family spirals out of control, as during her mother’s psychotic breakdown in Chapter 7.  

While the stories that her father tells at the Liars’ Club are one kind of lie, then, the stories that Karr hears from her Baptist classmates are another. Her father’s stories, while not strictly true, often tend to reveal messy, difficult truths about the world. Her Baptist classmates’ stories, on the other hand, tend to simplify and sentimentalize the world. Karr’s mother’s stories about her early days in New York City also fall into this latter category, even if they are the opposite of pious. Rather than tell her children about what happened to her in New York City, Karr’s mother retreats into gauzy reminiscences about concerts, art shows, and celebrities. Even before Karr understands just how much her mother is leaving out in these stories, she senses with a child’s intuition that she is not telling the full truth. She senses this because of her mother’s generally dreamy and disconnected demeanor and because of the “Yankee voice” that her mother slips into at these times: a clipped, affected, absent voice that is very different from her father’s varied storytelling voices.  

It is probable, however, that Karr’s mother’s stories are her own way of rewriting her history, and therefore of surviving; her New York reminiscences also give her something lofty to aspire to, outside of her existence as a wife and mother. Like the stories of Karr’s Baptist classmates, they insist on an alternate reality that is more vivid and meaningful than that of small town Texas. It is Karr’s task, in telling her own story, to understand the impulses behind the stories of those around her, and to separate what is real in them from what is false.