In her memoirs, Karr calls the town "Leechfield." Karr's father worked in an oil refinery while her mother was an amateur artist and business owner.
Karr was born January 16, 1955, in Groves, a small town in East Texas located in the Port Arthur region, known for its oil refineries and chemical plants, to J. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. Their destination is, ostensibly, California, but for many of them it will be a much darker place: death, jail, suicide.Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. That was part of their allure." This fairly ordinary route down a psychedelic path will lead Mary to leave Leechfield, at the young age of 17, with a group of like-minded surfers. One form of escape was with drugs: "Sure you were told that drugs cut a coiled and downward swerving path to degradation if not death. Karr describes Leechfield as having a "mind-crushing atmosphere of sameness", as a place "worthy of escape".
These abuses are merely alluded to in Cherry, but described in full bitter detail in the first memoir, in a voice which is a seamless blend of the child's pain with the adult's undying memory of it. As an eight-year-old, she was raped by an older boy near her house and, when she stayed home from school with a fever, a male baby-sitter had forced his penis into her mouth. The much-fantasised yet dreaded moment of losing her virginity – the "cherry" of the title – never quite moves out of the shadow of Mary's darkest secret. The catharsis is so complete that it is easy to forget that after that childhood, life went on. When you finish the last chapter, you quite simply celebrate her survival. You cry at her dark loneliness, you rejoice at her humour and defiance. You relax into a light adventure or innocent beauty, wholly unprepared for the sudden jolts of harrowing violence experienced by the tiny "little Mary". The Liars' Club (Picador, £6.99) is written by a master of poetically slangy prose, a language so alive and original it makes the telling of acutely painful experiences seem like child's play. The ending unveiled the adult Mary's understanding of the sources of her mother's mad, self-destructive behaviour, and the weakness behind her father's monumental strength.
For me, it was a memoir which had the purgative power of the best of fiction. Drawing on astonishingly vivid and precise memories of her early years, she managed to relive, in poignant detail, the daily fears, joys and revelations of the little girl she once was, and recreate for us a world of epic suffering within one small, feral family. In her unforgettable first memoir The Liars' Club, Mary Karr, a poet and critic, told the extraordinary story of her childhood in a dreary Texas refinery town.
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