**My father comes into focus for me on a Liars ’ Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can * ’ t but write it in the present tense.***Mary Karr grew up in a swampy East Texas refinery town in a volatile and defiantly lo...

**My father comes into focus for me on a Liars ’ Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can * ’ t but write it in the present tense.***Mary Karr grew up in a swampy East Texas refinery town in a volatile and defiantly loving family. In this funny, devastating, haunting memoir and with a raw and often painful honesty, she looks back at life with a painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip over into psychosis, and a hard-drinking, fist-swinging father who liked nothing better than to spin tales with his cronies at the Liars’ Club.

When it was published in 1995,* The Liars’* Club raised the art of memoir to a new level and brought about a dramatic revival of the form. It is a classic that paints a harsh world redeemed by Karr * ’s warmth, intelligent humour and finely spun prose. The Liars ’ Club * is both heart-stopping and heart-felt.