Concentrate

Last summer I went camping in Maine. It was hotter than I expected. One day I was tired in the middle of the day and decided to take a nap. I went into my tent and laid on my air mattress. The sun was directly above my tent and shone right down on me. I could feel the concentrated heat on my face. It was powerful. I was uncomfortable and eventually the concentrated heat pushed me out of my tent.

That’s how I felt reading The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr.

The Liar’s Club is the memoir of the poet Mary Karr. She lays out her life. While a majority of the memoir focuses on her life when she was 7 and 8 years old, Karr jumps around in time, giving us a sense of how different parts of her life affected her. She discusses her parent’s tumultuous relationship, her mother’s mental health issues, and sexual assault.

Karr explains various scenes from her life in excruciating detail. Detail that is personal to her experience in that moment. Everything from what she saw, smelled, and felt is laid out for us, giving us a visceral understanding of what that moment must have been like for Karr. At one point, she talks about how her grandmother smelt like water moccasins, a specific detail that stuck with me.

It’s Karr’s work as a poet that makes her writing so memorable. She clearly has a grasp over the language in a way that can make you feel things in a very real way. I listened to this book as an audiobook, and had to take several breaks because I could feel every single thing Karr felt. The emotion was concentrated, like the sharp taste of lime.

Particularly, Karr explains when she was sexually assaulted with painful detail. I had to stop, pause, and catch my breath, because I could feel what she was feeling. I could feel her confusion, her fear, her loneliness. Even when she described her parents turbulent relationship, and the effects that it had on her, I could feel it.

But perhaps the most poignant part of the book is in the things left unsaid. Karr’s parents had a turbulent relationship. The sense of abandonment that Karr feels in the absence of her parents attention is not only seen in the events that follow, but the way she hesitates to ask for the basic things she needs.

All in all Karr’s memoir is a beautiful exploration of childhood loneliness, and the motivations behind one’s life. I felt like I had a clear understanding of not only the person that she was, but the person that she became, and how her life and her relationships shaped that. The intensity of emotion made it difficult to listen to in one fell swoop, but it was what made the book stand out.