Recommendations from our site
“There’s a lot of rage, alcohol and guns in this book. I cannot say enough about the power of Mary Carr’s voice. It’s the kind of book you almost want to read out loud. And it’s just so Texas, so specific East Texas.” Read more...
Attica Locke, Novelist
“It’s one of my favourite memoirs. I think she manages to capture the city that she lived in, and its surroundings, beautifully — you can almost smell the oil refineries. I don’t believe she names the city, but it’s in that east Texas, Gulf Coast area where there are a lot of oil refineries, and a lot of people who work on the rigs. So she captures that beautifully and I felt it was an honest book.” Read more...
Calvin Trillin, Comedians & Humorist
Another hit memoir about unorthodox upbringings, this time set in east Texas, where the author’s father worked at an oil refinery. The 1995 publication of The Liars’ Club made Mary Karr an overnight celebrity. Her writing is highly regarded—her poetry has won her a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award and several Pushcart Prizes—but Karr is far from a starchy member of the literary establishment. Salty, funny, and deeply poignant, this is a rare jewel of a book, one that redefined the whole genre of autobiography.
From our article Books like Educated
Other books by Mary Karr
Our most recommended books
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How to Say Babylon: A Memoir
by Safiya Sinclair -
Speak, Memory
by Vladimir Nabokov -
Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon
by Sir Henry Channon -
Basil Street Blues
by Michael Holroyd -
The Self-Aware Image: An Insight Into Early Modern Meta-Painting
by Victor Stoichita -
Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement
by Tarana Burke
