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.