Memoirs of Survival: Reading the Past and Writing it Down Mary Karr's The Liars' Club and Barbara Robinette Moss' Change Me Into Zeus' Daughter

ALAN Review, Winter 2005 by Marler, Myrna Dee

The literary memoir has become popular in the last several years. Almost everybody who makes it to adulthood has a story to tell about negotiating the perils of growing up in a dangerous culture. Some, especially those written for a pre-teen audience, recount happy memories, playing stickball in the vacant lot and bubblegum-blowing contests. Most, though, are stories of survival recounting how the teller overcame obstacles to snatch at a more satisfying adulthood. The overt message of these memoirs is the same as many young adult novels, i.e., "You can do it." "You are not alone." "Determination and persistence can take you as far as you want to go in America." The implicit message, though, is that through writing, you can reclaim a childhood, where you were once an impotent victim, and through the power of authorship, make it your own, reconcile yourself with your past, and-ultimately-heal. Both the explicit and implicit themes make such memoirs valuable tools in the junior high or high school English classroom although they differ from young adult fiction in that the voice is usually that of a grownup recalling the perils of childhood with the message that the path to manhood or womanhood is negotiable and adolescents need to be aware that life continues beyond high school.

Two memoirs of growing up female in the South, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Barbara Robinette Moss' Change Me Into Zens' Daughter, demonstrate how writing both frames and heals the scars from growing up. Both authors were impoverished, their childhoods marked by parental substance abuse, male violence, distant mothers, chaos, and social marginalization. Because they were children, both girls were helpless in the face of parental whimsicality, no matter how much each may have raged against circumstance. Yet, during the course of their brutal childhoods, each girl was given the gift of literacy by their mothers and a vision of somewhere away from the homes they were planted in as a place to grab for the American Dream.

Male violence perpetrated by a hair-trigger temper is a feature of southern culture. The two fathers in these memoirs are both violent and proud of it. Significantly, both books begin with the death of the father and the family gathered around the casket, each girl now a grown woman trying to reconcile the past over the body of the dead father with their living mothers and siblings. Beginning each memoir with the fathers' deaths suggests the end of the dominating father figure and signals the freedom for the authors to finally write their own stories and reveal the subversive, almost hidden influence of the mothers.

The maternal influence was subversive and hidden because both mothers were unable to give their daughters the love and emotional support they needed because of the dysfunctional relationships with their husbands. Each mother was emotionally distant. Karr's mother was deemed by the neighbors as "nervous" and was at times sent away to an institution to recover. This "nervousness" is not only a euphemism for insanity but was hereditary. Karr says, "when Mother could be brought to talk about her own childhood, she told stories about how peculiar her mother's habits had been" (44). Although her mother wasn't physically abusive, Karr was always wary of her emotional outbursts because it seemed as if "some kind of serious fury must have been roiling around inside her. Sometimes . . . she would stand in the kitchen with her fists all white-knuckled and scream up at the light fixture that she wasn't whipping us, because she knew if she got started, she'd kill us" (71). Karr's mother spent months at a time in an alcoholic or pill-induced haze. At those times, Karr would count her drinks, pour bottles of liquor down the sink, listen to her parents' violent fights, and worry. She says, "Mother had always been a binge drunker, not touching a thimbleful for weeks or months when she'd gotten her gullet full. But once she took that first drink, she was off" (126-127). At other times, her mother lay in bed for days, not bothering to get dressed, reading from a stack of books piled on her bedside table (142). Karr remarks that she called these episodes "Her Empress Days [. . .] for she spent them doing nothing more than ministering to herself in small ways" (230). This, of course, led to many incidents of parental neglect and even allowed the opportunity for sexual abuse from unsavory babysitters. But, even worse were the times her mother became addicted to uppers. "[S]he never slept. I don't mean that she didn't sleep much, or slept less. I mean all those months, we never saw her asleep. Ever" (230). On many occasions, especially when drunk and mournful, Karr's mother talked "in a misty-eyed way about suicide. She would gaze up [. . .] and say that for some folks killing yourself was the sanest thing to do" (230). As Karr notes, such threats "will flat dampen down your spirits" (71). And, in fact, on at least three occasions, with the family in the same car, Karr's mother seemed intent on committing suicide and taking the rest of the family with her. As a result, Karr learned early that "things in my house were Not Right [. . .] ." (9). This perception then quickly "metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of 'Not-Rightness'" (10).