She was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. Her memoir The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year and was named one of the year's best books. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University and, in 2015, was chosen to deliver the commencement speech at the university.

She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist, and memoirist. Currently-teaches English at Syracuse University.Now with a new introduction that discusses her memoir's impact on her family, this unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as 'funny, lively, and un-put-downable' ( USA Today) today as it ever was. Salinger's-a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. When it was published in 1995, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, as well as bringing about a dramatic revival of the form.

The Liars' Club by Mary Karr