Karr's The Liar's Club

Blog 5

I don’t typically read memoirs, and to be honest I wouldn’t have picked this one up. There’s just something about them that doesn’t appeal to me. Many people experience poor childhoods with insecure family members in dry and dangerous environments. I guess it’s all about how you write the people involved or the memories you experienced…

I would have difficulty writing about another’s personal issues. I was once writing a Mary-Sue Harry Potter fanfiction and wanted to use my parents names in it for the first chapter. My step-father was ardently against it and refused to let me. He didn’t want people on the internet reading about him. For the people I don’t like or treated me poorly, I might not have much of a problem. But for people I care for, I’d be afraid of outing them about something or writing a scene that was supposed to remain secret. Changing names is one thing for national readers, but for local readers or those who are somehow connected to me or the situations, those people would see through the names and figure out who I was writing about. Then, it’s no different from using the actual name, and those are the people that the initial ones probably want to avoid. I suppose, then, it would depend on what I was writing about in order to decide if I would include someone or that person’s real name.

If, however, the people were no longer around, then any personal story, like the cutting story, would help shape the person’s character. It would help readers to understand who the person was. With Karr’s method of altering stories, we can still infer who the people were because each story at least had a grain of truth to them. Those are the easiest lies to accept. In term of literary qualities, Karr uses at least two: scope and intent, and voice. The Liar’s Club illustrates scope and intent because it shows all the conflicts and problems she faced in her childhood and how she dealt with them, which both helped her develop a sense of self as she grew. She also works with voice, because she shifts between an adult voice and that of a child’s within a paragraph or less, showing both how she spoke then and her mentality at the time, then contrasting it with the overall adult narration.

If I was considering writing a memoir, it’d contain personal information. I would cross a line within myself, and there’d be no going back. I’m sure there are a number of lines that I’d draw, but if I put myself outside of myself, detached permanently, I might be able to write about anything. The problem there is that even if I’m capable of detaching during the writing process, people will continue to make me relive the events in public during book readings or interviews. It’s one thing to speak to anonymous people on the page, it’s another to face them in public readings or TV/radio interviews. They aren’t as anonymous then, nor would I be. The author would have a face and voice instead of just words.