Membership in Karr's Club

Mary Karr's idea that "the alleged truth of a given voice makes it somehow more emotionally compelling" and "thus announces itself as real" is one that any writer of character-based nonfiction needs to understand. Voice and "precise, original language" are two of Karr's strongest allies in her work. She's got place as character, of course-- the way she describes the skies or the openness of her Texas childhood serves to further
set the reader in the state of wild abandon that her childhood seemed to have been.
But anyone can write about Texas in the 60s, or fractured families, or men getting together for construction jobs and beer drinking. What makes Karr's story her is the way her language defines her particular social circle, family, region and time frame. And even if the "truth" of an event is different from how it happened, the alleged truths of her characters voices are different truths than the stories those voices tell.

What I mean by that is that no matter whether or not Karr's grandpa really died by hanging or her sister really did act in a certain way or her mom really was Nervous and acted out to such extremes doesn't matter, in the way Karr has written it. The events don't necessarily need to be true, because we can understand the kind of person who might have done those things so well simply by "hearing" their voices on the page.

What this does for readers, then, is create a whole world and a whole way of life out of something that may or may not have happened. The use of voice and language as character gets inside the idea of a larger truth of humanity. We are all unique individuals, with our own ways of talking, acting, thinking and rationalizing things. For Karr, growing up the way she did, her ability to rationalize and understand the world around her had a lot to do with the stories her dad told. These stories gave her a place to be in the world, whether it was literally, as in in a corner of Fishers, or figuratively, as in how she came to know her father and family through stories.

What we, as readers, then take from seeing this is that we too can look at the stories around us and figure out how and where and why we fit into certain places in the world. We're all confused and lost and scared at times, and everyone has at least one memory they'd like to erase or forget or otherwise distance themselves from. There are also the great memories of events that have become even more epic as time passes and we begin to remember these events differently each time. In reading a literary memoir like The Liar's Club we all gain admission into our own story and way of telling it comfortably.