Liars’ Club - by Mary Karr
Published:
Liars’ Club - by Mary Karr
Read: 2024-10-03
Recommend: 2/10
This book didn’t capture my interest, and I ended up giving up about 60% of the way through.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
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.
Mother threatened divorce a lot of times, and Daddy’s response to it was usually a kind of patient eye-rolling. He never spoke of divorce as an option. If I asked him worried questions about a particularly nasty fight, he’d just say I shouldn’t talk bad about my mother, as if even suggesting they might split up insulted her somehow. In his world, only full-blown lunatics got divorced. Regular citizens in a bad marriage just hunkered down and stood it. His uncle Lee Gleason, for instance, didn’t speak to his wife for forty years before he died, but they didn’t bother with divorce.
Three husbands crossed the line between a small mistake and a nasty habit. (An often-divorced friend of mine once declared that when you’re saying “I do” for the third or fourth time, you have to admit to yourself that they can’t be entirely at fault.)
But I was spiteful enough to tell her that I didn’t much want to sign up with any god who sent tidal waves crashing down on trailer parks but took time for her old wart. (Despite my breathtaking gullibility, I was able to spew out such random hunks of elementary logic sometimes.) Back home, the light in our windows was gradually turning a darker and darker shade of charcoal. Mother was hanging draperies over the big picture window, and through that window, I could see the Sharps’ Chevy backing out of their driveway, tarp and all. What if old Mr. Sharp’s right about God and Jesus? I must have said out loud. Or maybe I suggested we pray just in case—I don’t remember. What’s dead clear now is how Mother lifted her middle finger to the ceiling and said, Oh, fuck that God! Between that and the tornado sirens and the black sky that had slid over all our windows and Grandma stone deaf to that blasphemy because she was tatting those weensy stitches, I began to think we’d be washed out to sea for all our sins at any minute.
That’s in blinding rain, rain so heavy the wipers never really showed you the road. They just slapped over the blur and then slapped back to reveal more blur.
She said, go on and make a wish, you little turd. I squinted my eyes as hard as I could and wished silently to go and live some other where forever, with a brand-new family like on Leave. It to Beaver. Then I sucked up as much air as I could get and blew the whole house dark.