Childhood In Mary Karr's The Liars Club

In the book The Liars Club, by Mary Karr, she utilizes the literary element voice to weave together a story of her unfortunate childhood. This book covers the majority of her childhood years, and the several problems her childhood included. When Karr narrates the book she is the sole voice in the text, however she also incorporates others statements and communication through her own voice. She uses voice to piece together her own, and other’s statements into the story of her childhood. While Mary Karr is the only narrator in the story, the text is polyvocal, meaning that multiple individuals are voiced through Karr’s narration. “That is, the metaphor of ‘voice’ attached to the narrating ‘I’ may influence us to think of life writing as monovocal,

In this club, men spend time together telling stories from their past, renegading each other with unbelievable stories. The theme of lying is throughout the story, a notable instance is during Mary Karr’s time in Colorado. “Mother pulled her shirt over her head and said she was glad I’d come home for lunch for a change. That lie wounded me worse than the shirtless fact of my mother stretched half-naked under a cowboy. She wasn't one bit glad to see me.” (Karr, 196) Throughout the text the author quotes her father, and interacts with him through conversation. With her mother she notices specifics in her appearance more than anything; she spends time describing how her mother looks in a passage instead of the conversations she had with her. An example of this is when she is leaving her mother in Colorado, and returning to Texas to live with her father. She says she can’t remember anything during that period of time, “Any talk with Mother after Lecia’s call was siphoned from my head.” Shortly after the instance of lying to the narrator, her mother left on a trip to Mexico, to which she returned with another man who wasn't her father. She quoted her mother in italics when she said “Say hello to your new daddy.” The italics are due to the intense message she was portraying; her mother believed what she was doing at the time was accepted by her children. This is one of the few instances in the text when she represents voice as