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Two soon-to-be classic memoirs still resonate

by Jeanne McDonald

The best kind of story is a true story. But how can we measure the accuracy of the facts in, for example, a book like Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt's memoir about his deprived Irish-American childhood? Can the author truly recall smells, sounds, emotions, and conversations that took place more than 50 years ago?

Not exactly, says memoirist Patricia Hampl, author of Virgin Time and A Romantic Education, but close enough to be authentic. Hampl calls the literary form of the memoir a meeting between memory and imagination: The author doesn't have to tell the truth, but is obligated to tell a truth as he or she remembers it. The rest, necessarily, is imagination.

Not one, but two powerful memoirs by Mary Karr, The Liars' Club (Viking, $14) and Cherry (Penguin, $14), shock the reader with accounts of the true and horrific events that occurred in Karr's childhood recalled in incredible and thoroughly believable detail. These books could have been unsparingly grim for any number of reasons: Both of Karr's parents were alcoholics. Her mother was certifiably crazy, married multiple times, and had two children whose whereabouts she could not account for. Karr's maternal grandmother was so bitter and vindictive that she once wove an intricate leather strap meant to whip the rebellious spirit out of Mary and her sister, Lecia.

Secret sorrows, losses, and mysteries were sewn into the fabric of Karr's childhood, as told in The Liar's Club, and her adolescence, as recorded in Cherry, yet she writes about her fractured early life with humor and objectivity. In memoirs, epiphanies abound, and Karr is not without her own intuitions. Writing with a style sometimes poetic and often gritty, she says, "The truth...flickers past you like a spark. For years you've felt only half-done inside, cobbled together by paper clips, held intact by gum wads and school paste. But something solid is starting to assemble inside you. You say, I am my Same Self. That oddball catchphrase will serve as a touchstone in years to come, an instant you'll return to after traveling the far roads. You were there solely for embellishment and witness. You were there to watch."

Watching her life unfold under such circumstances makes Karr a witness to multiple crimes committed against her. Yet she never gives up. Not even after her mother, Charlie, makes a huge bonfire in the yard, burning her daughters' belongings and then coming after her kids with a butcher knife. Not even after Charlie divorces her children's father and takes off with a drunken cowboy. Not even after unspeakable abuse from a male friend of Charlie's when Karr is just eight years old. Throughout all this violence, the author somehow manages to hold onto her spunk, her humor, and her hope. And when things go wrong, as they inevitably do, her father "...told me the old lie that everything was fine and just to lay down. And that's what I did."

The Liars' Club, a group of men who meet to tell each other tall stories, is only a filmy sleeve beneath which real-life lies unfold, some of them lies of omission, others of commission. Kerr relates how her father made an unbelievable story believable at a Christmas Eve meeting with his buddies.

"'I'll tell you just exactly how my daddy died,' Daddy says. 'He hung hisself.'

"This is easily the biggest lie Daddy ever told—that I heard, anyway. His daddy is alive and well and sitting on his porch in Kirbyville with his bird dogs. The men meet here every year to swap and start consuming gift bottles of Jack Daniel's. This year's is white with a molded pheasant flying out of the brush.

"Four of these open bottles sit on the card-table corners. In the middle, there's a little battery-operated monkey Ben bought for his granddaughter. It holds two cymbals. When you turn it on, it bangs them together until you smack the top of its head. Then it bares its teeth and hisses at you."

Beautiful details. Such images of the past pop into the mind as perfect vignettes. And no one can dispute the information because the memories belong strictly to the writer. In Karr's case, writing about her life must have been as painful as it was cathartic, but at the end of Cherry, she seems to be putting the past into perspective and setting a course for her future spiritual and moral life.

Literature, writes Patricia Hampl, keeps trying to make flesh into word, but "the deepest experience of being alive, the mystical one, cannot be told. We're all trying to say our truth, bringing forward our oddly shaped piece of the puzzle." And as Karr extends her unique piece of the whole picture, we become the witnesses. This time, we are the ones who are there to watch.