At times when reading this memoir, I felt that maybe I had misread the date, and it was really set in the 1860s rather than the 1960s. This story of life in small-town Texas is Victorian in its austerity. Mary and her older sister Lecia had an alcoholic mother who became dangerously psychotic on at least one occasion, a hard drinking father who worked on an oil rig, and a very scary Grandma whose health was steadily declining. They battled the forces of nature occasionally but mostly they fought each other. Her father was a physically strong man, who liked to play pool with his friends, while they told tall stories to each other. This group was "The Liars’ Club."

Karr’s memoir raises some of the same issues as Lauren Slater’s Lying, but far more obliquely. Karr’s father makes up stories about how his father died, hanging himself in a house accident, when in fact the man was still alive. This raises the issue of how much of Karr’s memoir is true, and to what extent she is following in her father’s tradition. In the first part of the book, recalling her life in 1961, which takes 171 pages, Karr is seven years old. In the second, smaller part, it is two years later, when her family moved to Colorado. Although she does say that there are some episodes she can’t recall, she goes into amazing detail about those events in her young life: what people said, what clothes and jewelry people wore, and what she felt and thought at the time. Of course some people have better memories than others, but it’s clear that childhood memories are unreliable even for people who do have strong powers of recall. One is left feeling that accuracy of the story is at least up for debate.

The story itself is full of trauma–death, madness, crises, storms, abuse, fights, separations, and lots of pain. Karr had a very hard childhood, and so it’s easy to see how telling the stories of her life would be a way of dealing with it. But I found the story hard-going for much of the book; I preferred the final shortest section of the book, set in 1980, when Karr was in her late twenties, and her father had a stroke. Karr returns home and learns the details of the past she wasn’t told at the time. Having the story told with her adult perceptions is more interesting than her childhood view of the world.

I suspect that people with more in common with Karr may find her story more compelling that I did. This tale of life in the west may speak to those who also grew up in that region. It’s also possible that this would work best as an audio-book, because Karr’s primary skill may, like her father, be for telling stories out loud to an audience.

Categories: Memoirs