Sometimes you want a book that captures what you’ve known life to be; but sometimes you hunger for another type of book, one which hurls you into circumstances so unlike your own that you read in a kind of utter amazement. For me, this magnificent book is of that latter sort. It begins on a violent night in 1961 with Charlie Marie Moore Karr being taken away as "Nervous". She always had stood out as different, among the folks of Leechfield, Texas, what with her artist’s airs, impetuosity, hard drinking, and zinging backtalk (e.g., "You could see evil in the crotch of a tree, you old fart," snapped at a neighbor who criticised her breast-feeding her baby on her own porch). The same goes, eventually, for her pair of not-to-be-messed-with daughters, the younger of whom has here written a childhood memoir of exceptional intensity and brutal honesty, in language which sings with a feisty, raw, muscular, and startling poetry. The stark hues of Mary Karr’s unflinching portrait of her greatly troubled, much-married, and alcoholic mother are balanced by the gentler tones of her remembrances of her father P. J., the soft-spoken rhythms of whose extravagant fibbing in the company of his "Liar’s Club" cronies Karr captures with consummate artistry. It wasn’t a storybook upbringing, not by a long shot; and this memoir is no storybook, either. What The Liar’s Club is, though, is true and harshly beautiful, one of the finest American coming-of-age narratives I have ever read.

"I never knew despair could lie." (p. 320). Truth comes in waves in Mary Karr's The Liar's Club. Like the clouds of locusts, the hurricanes, the barren western Texas landscape and its enormously vast skyline, truth is ladeled out in blasts of wind, the crank of oil rigs, the smell of DDT, and generous scoops of Easy Perm. The title of this book is not only ironic, but visionary because the force of resistance to the truth is palpable in the lives of the people who forge their own survival in reaction to it. Truth touches them everywhere, but they don't want to feel it or to see it. It reaches out to them and they avoid it. It comes to them in the dark and gropes for them, stumbling over trash cans and littered yards. Only the oddball memories of a child are able to fuse together a tunnel of meaning at the end of which we can gather the hazy, purplish light of truth. The reigning conceit is that despair never lies. If that is true, then this book is a testimony to science. Despair litters the pages of Karr's work. It empties itself into every nook and cranny of her childhood. Her mother's case of Nervous is euphemistic and foreshadows her impending psychotic episode with fire and lipstick. Self-loathing seems to be a theme for this family, so that her mother's truth is, finally, an attempt to "scrub herself out" in every mirror of the house (p. 149). Her father's truth is no less ironic. The stories he telles are stories that make misery and cruelty sound funny. It is his way of not allowing himself to feel victimized by his circumstances or the course of his life. His truth is not to let life make you feel like a victim and he teaches that skill to his daughter so that she, too, will have the tools to survive the blasts of other people's craziness. He wasn't naive about life, but he tried to be prepared. He was reliable and even though "no technical truth" was ever told in his stories at the Liar's Club, "he knew how to be believed." (p. 14,15). The truth of knowing how to be believed is--when it comes to dealing with despair--more accurate than the facts themselves. Despair and misery are the theme of this book. They are what constitute its "truth," if that is what you are looking for. More than truth in any abstract or even statistical sense, this book tells the story of surviving human suffering and weakness. It's a guidebook for people who think they have lost their way in life and to their surprise, realize that every detour, every account of misery and pain, leads somewhere. The fact that despair does indeed lie is the truth at the core of Karr's piece. Knowing when to trust hope and when not to; knowing when to trust or believe the despair you feel and experience, and when not to is the great "truth" of this book. She shatters our ideology that misery is more honest than hope. Her truth is that believing in despair may unnecessarily create lunatics.

In the old days, for better or worse, everybody agreed upon the canon of Texas writing. It was largely a man's world, headed up by Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb. Katherine Anne Porter was worthy of canon's fame, though sometimes she was overlooked because she didn't live in the state and didn't often write about Texas. Other writers included Andy Adams, George Sessions Perry, Dorothy Scarborough, J. Evetts Haley, the three East Texas Williams-William Goyen, William A. Owens, and William Humphrey-Tom Lea, A. C. Greene, and John Graves, whose Goodbye to a River seemed to sum up the writers' general interest in land, nature, and the past. Among the upstarts back then were Larry McMurtry, whose Horseman, Pass By was an instant classic in 1961, and Billy Lee Brammer, whose The Gay Place, published the same year, also broke new ground. Dobie, incidentally, had reservations about the manners and morals in both books. Today there is little agreement, beyond five or six titles, on what is the best contemporary Texas writing. Academics in Texas colleges spent much of the eighties holding conferences on Texas writers, and there was a fair amount of attention paid in the press. Now in the downsized nineties, the funds for such conferences appear to have dried up and the people who worry about such matters sit in solitary cubicles sending e-mail lists to one another. An encouraging development is the designation of March as Texas Writers' Month, placing scribblers right up there with Kindness Week and School Board Recognition Month. In any case, the following list is not mine alone-but it is my compilation of the selections of others who also toil in the parched vineyards of Texas literature. The twenty books are listed chronologically, not by rank. One restriction was that the books had to deal centrally with Texas, but the author did not have to be a Texan. As it turned out, most were Texans or near Texans anyway.

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MARY KARR, The Liars' Club, 1995. Best memoir in a long time. Set mainly in 1961 in the industrialized, chemically sodden lowlands of East Texas, Karr's account of her incredibly dysfunctional family is a poignant page-turner. It's also very funny. She resurrects honorable expressions that I haven't heard for thirty years, like "I shit you not." She also, no easy feat, creates three unforgettable characters-a hard-working, hard-drinking father; a high-strung mother who marries instead of dates; and Karr, a nervy, smartassed kid and survivor.

COULD MARY KARR GO HOME AGAIN? That was the lingering question last summer for the 41-year-old Syracuse University professor. Her East Texas memoir, The Liars' Club, had met with so much critical adulation, from reviewers as diverse as Molly Ivins and the New York Times's Michiko Kakutani, that the book's single dissenter--a cranky critic in Tennessee who felt that Karr didn't treat her one-legged grandmother very charitably--must have felt like the publicist for the Flat Earth Society. The Liars' Club had become the read among literary wags, a hit among dysfunctional yuppies, and a growing favorite among the Kmart set. It was that rarest of publications, the literate page-turner--though its success came at the obvious expense of Leechfield, the pseudonym Karr chose for her Port Arthur-area hometown. In light of Karr's portrayal of Leechfield as a greasy wasteland haloed by DDT, one had to wonder if the townsfolk might be tempted to, in local parlance, stomp her a new mudhole.

Karr got the verdict the day she phoned an old classmate. The woman's mother answered the phone. "Well," said the elderly Leechfield woman, "I read your book."

"Yes, ma'am," came the author's cautious reply.

A diplomatic silence followed, then: "Some pretty rough language in there."

"Yes, ma'am."

A longer pause.

"Course, that's how you were."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well. We still love you anyway."

It would be rather hard not to forgive this amiable, wearily attractive potty-mouth who calls her mother "my little huckleberry," randomly quotes Milton and Yeats, and then observes of some dubious distinction, "That's like winning a shitting contest." The same self-leavening spirit that balances her intellect and her earthiness is what has made Mary Karr's memoir one of the most resonant literary triumphs of recent years. The Liars' Club is a celebration of endurance, mercilessly aware but mercifully loving--a story of a crazily unique family that, in its telling, somehow throws an unerring light on every family in America. Hers is not the sanitized Ozzie and Harriet depiction of yesteryear, nor today's version, in which, as Karr delicately puts it, "every father is sodomizing his children with a mop handle." Instead, Karr's family is an outrageous flop in everything except its determination to hang together. All of Leechfield can surely identify with that, which is probably why classmates and ex-boyfriends keep turning up at Karr's frequent Texas bookstore appearances, along with old coots who bellow during the question-answer periods, "Hey, Mary, I knew your Uncle Crook!"

Success spoiled her only for a single day--specifically, August 6, 1995, when The Liars' Club entered the New York Times's best-seller list, and she returned from a Houston bookstore appearance in the afternoon to find her hotel room awash in flowers. The next day, while walking through Houston's Intercontinental Airport, Karr saw a uniformed man walking toward her with a bouquet. She arranged her most grateful smile--and then the flower delivery man walked right past her. Karr immediately picked up a pay phone and called her friend Tobias Wolff, the celebrated writer. After recounting what had just happened, she asked him, "Am I an asshole?"

"Yes," he informed her. "But because you told the story on yourself, you're a recovering asshole."

A year later, Mary Karr has even more fame from which to recover. The Liars' Club has remained on the Times's paperback best-seller list since March. The book's movie rights have been sold to 9 1/2 Weeks producer Frank Konigsberg, and Karr's planned sequel about her adolescence is certain to garner a huge advance. In the meantime, the success of The Liars' Club has been seen throughout the publishing industry as a sign of the commercial renaissance of the memoir as a genre, giving rise to a tidal wave of literary narcissism. In the span of a year Karr the poet and professor has become Karr the master memoirist and, now, Karr the conference panelist. Interviewers have asked her to account for the Death of the Novel; some have in fact blamed her for said death. A reporter from Time called Karr to solicit her opinion of Oprah Winfrey, since, as the reporter put it, "Oprah's the one who started all this confessional stuff."

"Actually," replied Karr as gently as she could, "I think Saint Augustine got there before Oprah did."

Not all of this is as ludicrous as it sounds. Karr's interest in memoirs goes way back, she says: "My mother being a portrait artist helped develop my interest in character and in the shape of a singular life." As a young poet, she pored over the great biographies of Samuel Johnson and John Keats. While obtaining her master's degree, Karr became a fan of fiction writer Harry Crews' surly autobiography, A Childhood; she also read the memoirs of Frank Conroy, Geoffrey Wolff, and Geoffrey's brother, Tobias, whose unsparing This Boy's Life was a major inspiration. As a young professor, Karr taught courses on memoirs, but the book list was regrettably male dominated, and as an academic ambition, she hoped to change that.

There had long been a memoir in Mary Karr, "standing in line for me to write it," she says. God knows she had the material: born and raised in the dismal oil patch; daughter of a flamboyant alcoholic mother who during a psychotic episode hallucinated that she had killed her children; sexually assaulted twice before the age of ten; a chronic runaway who somehow persuaded officials at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, to take her in on early admission. How this odyssey led, by the mid-eighties, to a rarefied academic career and recognition as a brilliant poet is itself miraculous. The renowned Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, now a Harvard professor of rhetoric, once asked Karr, "How did you ever get out of that place?" Astonished, she replied, "I got on a bus. How did you get out of Northern F---ing Ireland?" The equanimity with which she regarded her past especially amazed her new acquaintances. When Tobias Wolff introduced Karr to his agent, Amanda Urban, the latter was entranced by the East Texas poet's total absence of hostility: "She could tell these incredible stories," says Urban, "and never once felt sorry for herself. Not only was she thriving, she was making dinner party chatter out of it."

The past was not so benign as all that, of course. Living down the demons was its own odyssey. "I spent a lot of money going to doctors," Karr says. "I haven't been able to stay married, and I don't know if I ever will." She was compelled to swear off liquor and spent most of her evenings at home with books. Her dinner monologues and academic curiosities notwithstanding, Mary Karr's writing already reflected a yearning to reconcile herself with the madness in her past. Her best poems, like "Coleman" ("I wanted only to escape/the brutal limits of that town/its square chained yards, pumps/that bowed so mindlessly to earth,/the raging pistons of that fallen dynasty."), were not merely set in East Texas but also spangled with the horror and rage of the author's upbringing. In academic circles, Karr had created a stir by decrying the prissiness of new formalist poetry--"The highbrow doily-making that passes for art today," she scornfully wrote in one essay--but it might be fair to suggest that Karr felt somewhat mocked by the work of the neoformalists. After all, they could rise above the unholy mess of living; she couldn't, not for the life of her.

One evening in 1989, after hearing another round of lurid Leechfield stories, Urban told Karr, "I wish you'd write me a book proposal." Karr had recently ditched an attempt to craft a novel out of her life story. ("The weird thing was, I just used fiction as an excuse to correct history," she says. "The character who was me did volunteer work at the local nursing home. I was doctoring the facts to make myself look better.") She was flattered by Urban's offer but did nothing with it. Two years later, in March of 1991, Urban ran into Karr at a hotel bar in Manhattan and said, "Where's my book proposal?" Karr was more attentive this time. Her twelve-year marriage had just collapsed; she was flat broke and didn't have a car. She agreed to send the agent three chapters, along with a cover letter explaining the need for a woman's narrative.

Four months later, Karr's eighty-page manuscript arrived in Urban's office at International Creative Management. Urban wasted no time sending The Liars' Club out for auction. Viking made the highest of three offers, in the range of $50,000. The advance was parceled out over the two and a half years it took Karr to write the book, enabling the author to pay her always enormous long-distance phone bills. The first installment went toward a used Toyota Corolla.

Today Mary Karr could buy a Toyota dealership. But aside from a recent trip with her nine-year-old son to Disney World and the odd spree at Bloomingdale's--"I'm a big shoe slut," she confesses--Karr still lives and teaches in Syracuse, with no plans to ratchet up her lifestyle. The Corolla is still running, and she hopes it will outlast the inanities that have accompanied her fame. "A guy from Newsweek called me up," she says with her seen-it-all smirk, "and he said, 'I'm doing an article on all these memoirs, and I've talked to all these psychiatrists who've said that the process of writing memoirs is nothing like therapy.'

"And I'm like, 'No kidding, buddy! In therapy, you pay them! In memoirs, they pay you!'"