American · b. 1955
Mary Karr is an American poet and memoirist whose landmark memoir The Liars' Club helped launch the modern memoir boom. Celebrated for her ferocious honesty, dark humor, and electric prose, she is also the author of Cherry, Lit, and The Art of Memoir.
Mary Karr began as a poet, and a poet’s command of language runs through all her prose. Her 1995 memoir The Liars’ Club, an account of her turbulent childhood in an East Texas oil town, became a bestseller and a critical sensation, helping to revive and reinvent the literary memoir and inspiring a generation of writers.
She continued her autobiography in Cherry, about adolescence, and Lit, about alcoholism, recovery, and faith, completing one of the most acclaimed memoir trilogies in American letters. Her The Art of Memoir distills decades of writing and teaching into a guide to the form. She is also an accomplished poet and a longtime professor at Syracuse University.
Karr is admired for combining unflinching honesty about difficult experience with dark humor and dazzling craft, demonstrating that memoir, done well, is a serious literary art.
by Mary Karr
Mary Karr's landmark memoir of a turbulent Texas childhood. With ferocious honesty, dark humor, and dazzling prose, Karr recounts growing up in a gritty oil town with a hard-drinking father, a brilliant, volatile, much-married mother, and family secrets that threaten to destroy them all.
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