Mary Karr Interview

INTERVIEWER: Why did you feel a need to document your life? Did you write The Liars’ Club in order to get the story off your chest?

MARY KARR: By the time I wrote The Liars’ Club, it was off my fucking chest. I’d slogged through therapy, and my family was fairly healed, in no small part due to my mother’s own hard-won sobriety. I was divorced and sober and, remarkably enough, employed as a college professor teaching poetry. My sister’s family was the picture of prosperity. My dad had died after being paralyzed for five years. My son was thriving. But our story was nonetheless standing in line to be written.

Plus I needed the cake. Like Samuel Johnson said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” I was newly divorced, a single mom feeling around for change in pocket lint. I didn’t have a car, which meant taking my kid to the grocery store in his red wagon, and two hours of bus time to pick him up after school on days I taught. In some ways I was resourceful. My students would move out of town and I’d scavenge their old furniture to sell at a garage sale. My son, Dev, and I used to sneak into the pool at the Sheraton. We’d park illegally in the snowy lot with our bathing suits on under our winter clothes. We’d call it “going to the Bahamas.” That was our vacation. I was thinking about moving Dev’s bed into my room so we could rent out the other bedroom—grasping at straws, really.

- Mary Karr, Paris Review interview