Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
She manages to capture the city that she lived in, and its surroundings, beautifully – you can almost smell the oil refineries
So your first pick is The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. Why did you choose that to start with?
It’s one of my favourite memoirs. I think she manages to capture the city that she lived in, and its surroundings, beautifully – you can almost smell the oil refineries. I don’t believe she names the city, but it’s in that east Texas, Gulf Coast area where there are a lot of people who work on the rigs. So she captures that, and I felt it was an honest book. I give people a little leeway on memoirs. On regular non-fiction, I have orthodox views (or somewhere between Orthodox and Hasidic probably) – but when it comes to memoirs, I don’t really expect that the sentence that is being quoted from when the person was four years old, you can go to the bank with, but I feel it is their story. And I found hers essentially believable.
One of the reviews of Mary Karr’s book claimed it was the book that really kicked off the current vogue in memoirs…
I’m not sure that’s true. There’s a book by one of the Mitford sisters, Jessica, called Hons and Rebels. That was written in the 1950s – so it’s a form that’s existed for a long time. What may be different about a lot of the recent memoirs is the writers are not necessarily well known. Mary Karr is a poet and poets in the United States, you don’t even have to say they are not well known because there aren’t any well-known poets. So I think that’s one difference between a memoir and an autobiography – the person doesn’t have to be a household name to write a memoir. Maybe Mary Karr’s book started that – the idea of somebody just having an interesting story.
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Calvin Trillin is an American journalist and humorist. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1963 and has written 26 books. He has composed rhyming verses about the Bush administration and one of his novels, Tepper Isn’t Going Out, is devoted to the subject of street parking in New York City.
The Liars’ Club is a memoir in which Mary Karr looks back at her upbringing in an East Texas refinery town. What makes it worth reading?
The book starts with Mary Karr’s recollection of her mother, this tall striking woman who seemed out of place in this small, stinky, chemical-waste town. Her husband worked in a refinery. She was an artist who dreamed of a different life but was locked down by whatever was expected of her at that time in our nation’s history and in this region. There’s a lot of rage, alcohol and guns in this book. I cannot say enough about the power of Mary Carr’s voice. It’s the kind of book you almost want to read out loud. And it’s just so Texas, so specific East Texas. It’s like I grew up down the street and went to high school with her. Liars’ Club makes the reader feel like they’re sitting at a bar with somebody who is telling them about their crazy fucking life over cocktails. It’s fantastic.
What can we learn about the lives of ordinary oil workers by reading it?
The book paints a picture of how oil towns feel. My dad actually worked in oil – Shell Oil in Houston. People who work at refineries form a brotherhood. I wouldn’t go so far as to compare it to the military, but almost. Dangerous work, weird hours and lots of accidents produce a culture of people who look after each other. Women at times get left behind, either because the men are out on rigs or working in the Gulf or on the night shift. This book really captures the culture that comes from oil work.
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Texan Attica Locke’s noir novel Black Water Rising was nominated for numerous awards and long-listed for the Orange Prize. The New York Times compared it to the work of Dennis Lehane. A successful screenwriter, Locke now lives in Los Angeles
