“The Liars’ Club” (post 4) by Mary Karr (post 8): Memoir’s previously blanked-out revelation was a memory gap, typical of multiple personality  

At the end of this memoir, Mother’s unspecified mental illness is supposedly explained by this revelation: Many marriages ago, Mother’s husband at that time had taken their two children, Tex and Belinda, and disappeared. And when Mother eventually found them, she did not avail herself of legal authority to regain custody, because she felt she could not provide a good home as a single parent.

Her many subsequent marriages reflected her hope of establishing a stable home, so that she could take her children back. But due to mental instability and bad luck, that never happened. And she had kept those children a secret from her later children, Mary Karr and sister.

But why did Mother’s first husband suddenly disappear with their two children? And why, when she found them, did she not ask that question? Had Mother already been mentally ill and dangerous? Indeed, was her mental illness the cause, not the effect, of the abandonment? And was her mental illness of a kind in which she usually looked normal, especially in public, leading her husband to fear that he could never convince a judge otherwise?

Her history of having many subsequent marriages has diagnostic significance in distinguishing between a psychosis like schizophrenia and a dissociative neurosis like multiple personality disorder. It is only the latter in which the person would be sufficiently socially engaging to have all those relationships.

Memory Gap

As discussed in past posts, Karr explicitly says that she has a tendency to blank things out from her memory (i.e., have memory gaps, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality). The matter of her mother’s first two children is another example: Karr had been told about those two half-siblings when she was seven, many years before the end-of-memoir revelation, when she was twenty-five. But she had blanked out the memory, which she, herself, found hard to explain:

“…two extra kids who’d appeared from a pocket in Grandma’s apron were unfathomable. This doesn’t completely explain my blanking out Tex and Belinda, though, because usually you could convince me of anything” (1, p. 80).

“The Liars’ Club” Title

The regular gathering of her father and his friends to trade tall tales, which Karr calls “The Liars’ Club,” is not a big enough event in this memoir to explain why she made it the title.

Perhaps she thinks that writers of memoirs belong to a liars’ club. After all, how can they know the whole truth about themselves if they blank things out?

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