Mary Karr

Overview: The Liars' Club brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood. Cherry, her account of her adolescence, "continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal" (Entertainment Weekly). Now Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness-and to her astonishing resurrection. Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a...

The author shares a candid look at her own sexual maturity growing up in a Texas town. The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's-a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother...