Character Analysis: The Liars Club

The Liars Club is a story told as a memoir by Mary Karr and it is told from her point of view, and how she remembers certain moments of her life growing up in a small East Texas town. Karr talks mainly about her family and the people in her life who have all left a strong impression on her. In her story she describes and conveys the emotion and detail from her interactions with her family. While she focuses mainly on her relationships with her family, she demonstrates how she and her family defied stereotypical gender roles with their own strong which enabled them to cope with a hard life.
The story takes place in the 60’s in an East Texas town called ‘Leechfield’, Karr is the narrator and telling the story based on her memories. Although

Karr is molested at the beginning by her male doctor, and she remembers that he seemed to ‘minister’ to her health “with an uncharacteristic tenderness”, which shows off the negative stereotype of men being portrayed as perverted deviants (Karr 9). This is most likely due to statistics of men being commonly reported as sexual offenders more than women. Karr’s father, Pete is the main male character, even though he’s a drinker he is more of a social drinker instead of an alcoholic as he always drinks with his male friends. Another more positive stereotype about men is that they work hard for their families, but also make time for their ‘buddies’ and go drinking together, and this stereotype fits Pete perfectly. The downside is that because he’s so preoccupied with his life outside his family it’s made Pete unable to be a proper father to his two daughters, but he does let Mary listen to his stories with his friends. Despite his loving nature, he could do little to look after his daughters after his wife’s mental breakdown and even left them for a little

The Liars’ Club displayed all of the troubles that Karr and her family had to go through, but neither of them gave up once, despite all of the hardships and that “cobbled” them “together out of fear” (Karr 320). It’s not easy to look back on unfavorable memories, but in the end an adult Karr and her older mother were able to absolve their feelings by opening up and being honest about what had happened to them so they could be set free from the past. With true grit and family love Karr was able to show how she was able to cope with her abuse and traumatic memories by capturing the moments that strengthened her and her family’s characters and putting them all into her memoir. Karr could finish her memoir with on a soft note as she warmly thinks about her mother, father and sister. That moment was the strongest part about Karr’s memoir because she steps out of her ‘little girl’ self and as an adult woman she does not let the memories break her spirit as she tells her story about the people in her