Entry 6: Final Reflection

I found The Liars' Club to be an engrossing read, largely for the simple reason that it is so well-written. I feel as if Mary Karr's experience as a poet feeds into the natural rhythm and lyricism that is steady throughout the majority of The Liars' Club. Much of Mary Karr's imagery and figurative language was genuinely shocking in its accuracy and beauty. Mary Karr has the ability to word the simplest and smallest of actions in a lyrical way. An example of this is the following: "Anyway, there were little runs in her stockings, narrow black ladders starting up over her toes"(107). Another example of this is the following: "Ahead of us in the green water, I can see Lecia's pale white feet like the neon tailfin of a mermaid slipping away just out of reach" (117). Simply the way Mary Karr makes words sound together and the images she creates were a large part of the reason I so much appreciated this book.

Of course, Karr's family provides a wealth of material for the memoir. Karr's most argumentative and yet only consistent relationship is with her sister, while their mother deals with a mental instability that affects the entire family. Even their grandmother, who comes to stay during the last portion of her life, adds a dynamic to the family that is the subject of many paragraphs of The Liars' Club. These relationships and the emotions that they entail are surprisingly interesting, as Mary Karr, being a writer, is able to word them in a way that makes sense to the reader.

My first impression of this book was that it would be a little less intense than the actuality, which was extremely intense. I feel as though The Liars' Club focused more on the familial relationships and emotional conditions than actual events (for the most part), which makes it dissimilar to the memoirs we have read in class. Ultimately, I found that The Liars' Club painted a detailed "literary portrait" of Mary Karr's family.