600-ish words.

Mary Karr’s memoir, The Liars’ Club, is stuffed full of images. Karr walks you through some very difficult times in her life, and she does so by showing the memories in as much detail as she can manage. She makes the story more real to the reader through her images, it’s like the memories are your own, but at the same time not. Much of Karr’s story and the images used to tell it, revolve around her parents, her Father and his role, much more than her Mother. Karr uses the language in her images and the sentence structure to make the images of her parents more vivid, and memory-like.

One example of the images of Mary’s father is when Mary is first talking about her parent’s marriage. Just after a story of her father running away and then returning to his parents home Karr writes,

“To Mother, such stories show that Daddy offered steadiness. He always returned to the logging camp at the end of whatever journey and coming back was something she’d begun to need from a man, badly. He was a rock. Guys he worked with said you could set a watch by when he pulled into the parking lot or what time he clicked open his lunch box. “ (18).

This shows her father’s role in her childhood. He was the steadiness, the constant. He could be relied upon. The image itself shows this by comparing him with a rock, which of course is immovable. Karr also gives us a second image of her father as consistently on time, to the point where “you could set a watch” by his comings and goings. (18) The language she uses here, words like “steadiness”, and “rock” give us characteristics of her father. While the sentence structure shows us the depth of these traits in him. She uses both long and short sentences, the long one have the effect of producing an image of his deep-set predictability. The shorter sentences create the effect of the blatantness of his reliability. His steadfastness is contrasted by Mary’s mother’s unreliability. Mary gives us many examples of this, the best being her Nervousness causing her to burn all of their clothes and toys, and to stand over them with a knife. (149-157) She is unpredictable.

            Another image of her father is when Lecia calls him to have him send plane tickets for Mary and herself,

            “What Lecia said to Daddy that night stays with me, for she was suddenly issuing orders again, first for the operator to put us through, then to Daddy absent so long I faltered conjuring his face. Here’s exactly what Lecia said: “Daddy, you need to get us two airplane tickets back down there from Denver.” She didn’t ask, there was no maybe threaded through her voice, no sliver of doubt. […] The receiver was warm on my ear. Daddy wanted to know one thing: “You ‘bout ready to come home, Pokey?”” (256, 257).

In this image, you may not see him, but the scene is vivid nonetheless. This shows more of Karr’s father’s character and role in the family. He is the protector, the one they turn to when things aren’t right. This “theme” is repeated many times over, when Lecia is stung by the jellyfish, Mary thinks to herself that bad things aren’t supposed to happen when her father is around. (115) The way Karr describes her father without really doing it here is interesting. She shows us his ability to not question things, and to understand. His only question to Mary asking if she wants to go home. He does not ask what happened, or why they want to go home, he doesn’t even ask the obvious question of are they hurt. He seems to understand that neither Mary nor Lecia are hurt, and that it’s probably better to not ask questions at this point. 

            Karr shows us a lot of things about the people in her family through the wording, and structure of her images she uses to tell her story. She shows us Lecia’s adult like behavior, her mother’s unpredictability, and her father’s steadfastness, reliability and unquestioning nature.