“The Liars’ Club” (A Memoir) (post 2) by Mary Karr (post 6): Narrator with split personality compares mother to movie character with multiple personality

I’m two-thirds through this engrossing 320-page memoir. So far, it is retrospective to when the author was about eight years old. The child abuse mentioned at the beginning has not been discussed further. Her declared tendency to have memory gaps has continued, but is mentioned only now and then, in passing; for example, when she sleepwalked or blanked out:

“It was sometime in August that I started walking in my sleep. Actually I did things other than just walk: I’d go squat behind the living room drapes and go to the bathroom in a pile they sometimes didn’t find till the next morning…” (1, p. 61).

“Apparently I just blanked out her last visit along with a lot of other things. She [her grandmother] died, and I wasn’t sorry” (1, p. 99).

In Karr’s book on writing memoirs, previously discussed, she emphasizes the great importance of finding the right narrative “voice.” However, The Liars’ Club does not seem to have a single voice, but at least three, one adult and two child-aged.

It’s first words, “My sharpest memory” would seem to mean that the memoir will be from the perspective of the adult, looking back, but most of the rest, so far, has been from her perspective as a child.

And her personality as a child seems to be split into at least two parts: a girl who is sensitive, loving, and vulnerable and one who is insensitive (toward her grandmother), tough and violent (she had once assaulted a fellow 5-year-old, although she didn’t remember doing so, and she later takes revenge on another child by shooting him with a BB gun).

A puzzling inconsistency in personality, especially when it occurs in a person with memory gaps, raises the possibility of multiple personality.

Her Mother

I previously noted her mother’s eye-rolling and aspirin-taking as conceivably related to multiple personality. As the memoir continues, Karr mentions that her mother’s accent changes from it’s usual one (they live in Texas) to one from the North:

“Then she took on that Yankee accent” (1, p. 128).

“We [Karr and her sister] have left our room a mess, she says in a hoarse voice I don’t think of as hers. But that’s the only voice she has left, her drunk Yankee one” (1, p. 149).

Is this change in speaking voice—which “I don’t think of as hers”—only because her mother may have once lived in New York and now speaks this way when she is drunk? Or is this an example of how, in multiple personality, different personalities may have different ways of speaking, and her Yankee accent is the way that her drinking alternate personality speaks?

On the previous page, Karr cites a movie: “Mother’s back to me in that rocker conjured that old Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho she’d taken us to in 1960” (1, p. 148). In that movie, the mother in the rocker turned out to be the alternate personality of a male character. But since Karr does not specifically mention this about the movie, and only refers, nonspecifically, to its craziness, it appears she did not realize that she was comparing her mother to a depiction of multiple personality disorder, per se.

1. Mary Karr. The Liars’ Club (A Memoir). New York, Viking, 1995.