Lessons from Mother and Daddy

Mary Karr’s memoir The Liars’ Club opens with an epigraph from Ezra Pound (“nothing matters but the quality / of the affection / that has carved the trace in the mind“) and her earliest memory: she is seven, and the family doctor sits before her at her home in east Texas. It is 1961. We’re not sure of her injury, but the police are there, and her drunken father has been fighting. (Not, thankfully, with Mary nor her sister; a drunk through and through, he never lays a violent hand on either of his girls.)

It all started years before when Karr’s mother left her last marriage (she had many) and life as an artist in New York City and found herself pulled over at a gas station in Leechfield, Texas. The man she met there — her next husband and Mary’s father — was, “in short, a Texas working man, with a smattering of Indian blood and with personality traits that she had begun to consider heroic.”

It is a childhood marked by unseemly moments that hold a whole lot of meaning for a nine-year-old girl. When Mary and her sister Lecia find out that their mean, prosthetic-legged grandmother has died, their school’s principal drives them home from school. At home,

Daddy was squatting on the porch in his blue overalls and hard hat, smoking, when we pulled up. He was dirty and smelled like crude oil when he hugged Lecia and me, one under each arm. Our principal didn’t pause, though, before shaking his hand, didn’t even dig out his hankie to wipe the oil off his palm after he shook. He was partial to white starched shirts, but knew when to set that aside.

Mary endures. Her mother and father fight more and turn to the kind of sun-up-to-sun-down drinking (he whiskey, she vodka) that takes over their lives.

But it’s not all heavy. Karr’s book title comes from her father’s brotherhood of unionized oil workers who pass their non-working hours over Lone Star beers, hand-rolled cigarettes, pool, and stories at the American Legion bar in Leechfield. The Liars’ Club, young Mary calls them; they embellish almost everything they say. Daddy calls her “Pokey,” and she sits with the men while they tell stories.

Of her father’s pal Blue, she writes, “He was one of those clean, featureless men who can move for decades on the periphery of a pool game buying his fair share of beers without ever uttering a full sentence.” She says that something about the Legion made her “solid inside,” that it clarified for her who she was. Rural 1960’s Texas comes fully alive on her page.

Karr’s book, published in 1995, set a certain standard for the coming-of-age memoir, and the recent publication of J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar holds a similar stature. The Tender Bar is similarly honest and vivid in its portrayal of a boozy boyhood on Long Island. I reviewed Moehringer’s memoir in 2006, writing:

He was a fatherless boy who loved nothing more than the Mets, and wanted nothing more than happiness for his mother. The two of them lived in the smelly, falling-apart home of his grandparents just steps from the local watering hole, Publicans. There Wall Street execs and blue-collar workers alike were made to feel at home, and literature and war were discussed with the same frequency and emotion as New York sports.

If these two tales are any indication, it’s the case that, for better or for worse, American bars can sometimes do a better job than parents in raising a child. The Liars’ Club, for me, is also closely reminiscent of Tobias Wolff’s excellent 1989 memoir, This Boy’s Life.