As I write this post, I am still in the midst of reading Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, and so far I have to tell you it’s not at all what I thought.
A lot of books get a lot of praise for being stories of triumph over adversity. It seems in vogue to write about a life that starts of awful and ends up beautiful, and it’s all because the author had the gumption to pull herself up by her bootstraps and make the best of it. People love a good redemption story.
Being a bit of a misfit (my dad always described me as “oppositional defiant” as though it were a disease), I cannot bring myself to read most of these books, so when I heard Mary Karr’s book discussed in terms of her troubled childhood, I felt repulsed. The thing is, I find that real life is difficult enough as it is, and while I love nonfiction, I typically feel all kinds of pukey about books about troubled childhoods. I mean, honestly, didn’t we all sortof have troubled childhoods? I mean, whose life is perfect? The downfall of memoir in my not so humble opinion is that we seem to think that anyone who’s been through anything difficult has the right to a book deal. Like, Whoa is me, my daddy is rich, and people had unfairly high expectations of me! or I was really poor for a while, but I lived through it, and now you should read about my days of eating ramen and scrounging change from the sidewalk to buy meals. (Oh, wait … no, that last one is how I got through college. It wasn’t that interesting after all.)
The point is, I was expecting to hate this book, but I felt compelled to read it because not only is it wildly successful, but writers I actually like and admire have said how great it is. So, I thought of it as homework, went to the bookstore and picked up a copy.
I’m not prepared to give a full review of it since I’m not done reading yet, but I can tell you this: I was supposed to pick up dinner on my way home the night I picked up The Liar’s Club, so I planned on just going in, getting the book, and hitting the road. I even thought maybe I wouldn’t start reading it until we got on the road for Digital Overload. But, just to be sure I wouldn’t be unfairly punishing myself, I decided to read the first page before purchasing it, a safety precaution I take often. If the first sentence was bad or seemed too self-absorbed or teen-angsty, I wasn’t going to buy it. I wound up standing there reading the first five pages or so, then sitting in one of those big leather reading chairs for about 15 minutes to read several more pages. Only when I realized I’d almost finished the first chapter did I close the book and proceed to the checkout counter.
This is a good book, and I think I can learn a lot from it. Look forward to a full review in the near future.
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