The Liars' Club

"The essential American story . . . a beauty." --Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

"Astonishing . . . one of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a backup opinion. . . . It's like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poet's precision of language and a poet's insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing event." --Molly Ivins, The Nation

"9mm humor, gothic wit, and a stunning clarity of memory within a poet's vision . . . Karr's unerring scrutiny of her childhood delivers a story confoundingly real." --The Boston Sunday Globe

"Overflows with sparkling wit and humor . . . Truth beats powerfully at the heart of this dazzling memoir." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Mary Karr's God-awful childhood has a calamitous appeal. The choice in the book is between howling misery and howling laughter, and the reader veers toward laughter. Karr has survived to write a drop-dead reply to the question, 'Ma, what was it like when you were a little girl?' " --Time

"This is the real deal; funny, painful, and hotter than Texas in September. This is what the memoir is supposed to be." --Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

"Elegaic and searching . . . her toughness of spirit, her poetry, her language, her very voice are the agents of rebirth in this difficult, hard-earned journey." --The New York Times Book Review