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A Study Guide for Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club"
A Study Guide for Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club"
A Study Guide for Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club"
Ebook36 pages19 minutes

A Study Guide for Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 20, 2016
ISBN9781535837941
A Study Guide for Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club"

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    Book preview

    A Study Guide for Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club" - Gale

    1

    The Liars' Club

    Mary Karr

    1995

    Introduction

    Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, published in 1995 in New York is a memoir of Karr's turbulent childhood in the fictional eastern Texas town of Leechfield, and later in Colorado. Karr's immediate family consists of her sister Lecia, two years older than she; her father, Pete Karr, who works at an oil refinery; and her mother, who is emotionally unstable and hates living in Leechfield.

    The memoir describes the sort of childhood that many people would wish to avoid. Mary's parents fight constantly and eventually divorce only to remarry later. Her mother's alcoholism and addiction to diet pills lead to many strange episodes, some of them frightening, as when she becomes unhinged and appears to be about to kill her children.

    Mary's father is a rough-and-ready, quarrelsome native Texan with Native-American blood who excels as a teller of tall tales in his group of buddies who meet at the American Legion. This group is christened the Liars' Club.

    Although the pages of The Liars' Club are chock full of arguments, fights, and unsavory incidents of all kinds, the memoir was hugely successful. This success is due to Karr's skills as a poet, her finely honed sense of humor, and her wonderful ear for the slang of eastern Texas. Readers probably also sense that underneath the surface turbulence, this dysfunctional family still loves each other.

    Author Biography

    Mary Karr was born in January 1955 in Texas, the daughter of J. P. Karr, an oil refinery worker, and Charlie Marie Karr, an artist and business owner. She had a difficult childhood which she describes in The Liars' Club and she left home when she was seventeen. Karr enrolled at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, but left after two years in order to travel. In 1978, she was admitted to Goddard College in Vermont where she met writers Tobias Wolff and Frank Conroy, both of whom encouraged her to write.

    Karr found her calling as a poet. She has remarked that she wanted to be a poet from about age seven. Her first volume of poetry, Abacus, was

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