8.0/10 (1035 reviews)
Get Martha Albrand With Fast and Free Shipping on eBay. 75 of The Top 100 Retailers Can Be Found on eBay. Find Great Deals from the Top Retailers.
- Collectables & Art
Huge Selection of New & Vintage
From Hornby, Bachmann, PECO & More
- Europemap on eBay
Free Shipping Available. Buy
Europemap on eBay. Money Back ...
- Collectables & Art
Thousands of 5-Star Reviews From Marketers And Content Professionals. Create Valuable And Unique Papers in Seconds. 100% Original & Human-Friendly Content.
8.0/10 (1522 reviews)
Browse new releases, best sellers or classics & find your next favourite book. Low prices on millions of books. Free UK delivery on eligible orders
Search results
Martha Albrand has 78 books on Goodreads with 420 ratings. Martha Albrand’s most popular book is No Surrender.
- Martha Albrand
Average rating: 3.31 · 115 ratings · 17 reviews · 78...
- Martha Albrand
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Key Figures
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, published in 1995 in New Yorkis 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...
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 ...
Part 1: Texas, 1961
The Liars' Club begins at a traumatic moment in Mary Karr's life, when she is seven. There has been a disturbance at her home in the town of Leechfield, Texas, as a result of which Mother is being taken from the house, having suffered a nervous breakdown. Mary and her nine-year-old sister Lecia are taken away by the sheriff and stay for a while elsewhere in the neighborhood. Karr relates how her parents met and married and also tells of her father's childhood, explaining that she learned abou...
Part 2: Colorado, 1963
Having inherited money from Grandma Moore, the family is living in more comfortable circumstances. They move to Colorado Springs, where Mother buys a stone lodge on the side of a mountain. Mary is now eight years old. From the bedroom window, she and Lecia enjoy watching bears roaming around, and they learn to ride a horse. They spend an idyllic day fishing for trout with Daddy. Mother spends much of her time at the local bar. Soon Mary's parents announce they are to divorce, and they give th...
Part 3: Texas Again, 1980
In 1980 Daddy has a stroke at the age of seventy and is incapacitated. Mother has stopped drinking but has become addicted to prescription drugs. She remains depressed. Mary, having left home permanently at seventeen, lives in Boston. She and her father have grown apart and no longer have much to say to each other. After Daddy's stroke, he loses the ability to speak coherently. Mary returns and helps her mother care for him. One day, while searching the attic for old medical records, Mary com...
Ben Bederman
Ben Bederman is one of the members of the Liars' Club. He always listens carefully to Pete Karr's stories and is usually the first to ask a question. He visits Pete in the hospital after Pete has a stroke and is distressed at Pete's condition. Almost every night he sits for hours outside Pete's hospital room.
Cooter
Cooter is one of the members of the Liars' Club. He often picks on Shug and scolds him because he is bothered by the fact that Shug is black.
Daddy
SeePete Karr
Survival of Love
The Liars' Clubis in many ways a grim story of the disruption of family life caused by a quarreling husband and wife, and a mother's alcoholism and mental instability. Although the devastating effect of this behavior on the children is apparent everywhere, especially in the aggressive behavior of Mary, it is not the main theme of the memoir. The main theme is the endurance of familial love in the worst of circumstances. The bonds generated by blood ties, even when put under tremendous strain,...
Imagery
Although Karr often uses vulgar expressions that are part and parcel of the way many of the local people speak, she also on many occasions uses highly poetic imagery. This creates quite a contrast for the reader. In one of the milder examples of local slang, for example, a girl emerging from a coma after contracting encephalitis is "half-a-bubble off plumb." But on the next page, Karr uses a more literary form of expression, a simile, to describe the effect of her father's voice on the neighb...
Topics for Further Study
1. Write your own one-to two-page memoir about an incident you remember from your childhood. Try to capture the child's way of seeing things. Write it in your own voice and style rather than trying to imitate Karr. 2. Research the topic of alcoholism and the effects it has on families, particularly children. Why do some people become alcoholics while others who drink do not? Is there a cure for alcoholism? 3. The Karr family is forced to flee Hurricane Carla in 1961 in Texas. Using the Intern...
Setting
The fictional town of Leechfield, in eastern Texas, is important in creating the atmosphere of the memoir. Leechfield is in every way an oppressive place. Sitting in a semitropical latitude close to the Gulf of Mexico, it is three feet below sea level at its highest point and two rivers run through it. It is so damp and swamp-like that the homes are built without basements, since it would have been impossible to keep them dry. The many oil refineries and chemical plants give the whole town a...
Memoir Genre
A memoir differs from an autobiography in that it does not cover the writer's entire life, only selected portions. Traditionally, memoirs were written by public figures late in their lives, reflecting on great events in which they had played a part. Thus, politicians and statesmen have been noted memoirists. In a memoir, the focus was usually not on the writer, but on other well-known people the writer had known or encountered. While there have always been literary memoirs as well as those by...
The Liars' Club remained almost sixty weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Critical praise for the work has been unanimous, and critics have searched for the most glowing adjectives to describe it. Louis Ermelino, for example, in People Weekly, calls it "an astonishing memoir" and praises Karr's use of "the rich cadence of the region and p...
Bryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey shows how Karr uses novelistic techniques in her memoir, and he also discusses how a memoirist may present a truthful account of her life even though she does not rely on a strictly literal, fact-by-fact approach. Many readers of The Liars' Clubhave commented on Karr's acute memory of the intricate details of her early life. Some readers wondered whether the memoir was really...
What Do I Read Next?
1. Karr's second memoir, Cherry: A Memoir (2000), describes her life as a rebellious adolescent. The memoir is written in the same style as The Liars' Club:by turns gritty, vulgar, and poetic. Karr goes through various adventures—many of them involving sex, romance, and drugs—in her quest to escape the confines of Leechfield, Texas. She turns a harsh light on her own follies as well as those of others. 2. Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996) followed The Liars' Clubonto bestseller lists. McC...
Adrian Blevins
Blevins's is a poet and essayist who has taught at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in the Virginia Community College system; Blevins' first full-length collection of poems, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, is forthcoming from Ausable Press in September of 2003. In this essay, Blevins argues that Mary Karr's penchant for concrete details undermines The Liars' Club 's believability. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses the term 'the willing suspension of disbelief' to talk about h...
Atlas, James, "The Age of the Literary Memoir Is Now," in New York Times Magazine,May 12, 1996, pp. 25-27. Ermelino, Louis, Review of The Liars' Club, in People Weekly,Vol. 44, No. 3, July 17, 1995, p. 28. Gardner, John, The Art of Fiction,Knopf, 1984, reprint, Vintage Books, 1985. Gass, William, "The Art of Self: Autobiography in an Age of Narciss...
Our Reading Guide for The Liars' Club by Mary Karr includes a Book Club Discussion Guide, Book Review, Plot Summary-Synopsis and Author Bio.
The Liars’ Club, Karr’s 1995 memoir of her Gothic childhood in a swampy East Texas oil-refining town, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, sold half a million copies, and made its forty-year-old author, who was then an obscure poet, a literary celebrity.
The Liars’ Club is a memoir by Mary Karr and was first published in 1995. It won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for nonfiction and was a New York Times bestseller. The subject of the memoir is Karr’s turbulent childhood.
Average rating: 3.31 · 115 ratings · 17 reviews · 78 distinct works. More books by Martha Albrand… Topics Mentioning This Author. Is this you? Let us know. If not, help out and invite Martha to Goodreads.
Nov 10, 2015 · Mary Karr kick-started a memoir revolution with The Liars’ Club, which was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, a best book of the year for The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, People, and Time, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Karr ...
