Chapters 1-4 Summary
The Liars’ Club opens in 1961 in the town of Leechfield, Texas, a foul and swampy oil town considered “one of the ugliest towns on the planet” and known for manufacturing Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. In the opening line of her memoir, Karr recounts her “sharpest memory… a single instant surrounded by dark.” Mary describes how her seven-year-old self and her nine-year-old sister, Lecia, witness their mother having a nervous breakdown. The town doctor, Dr. Boudreaux, arrives to their house to make sure the girls haven’t been hurt, and Sheriff Watson comes to take them to a neighboring house. The neighbor women watch on like a “SWAT team” as Mary’s mother, Charlie Marie Moore—who is diagnosed with what Eastern Texans colloquially call being “Nervous”—is transported to a mental hospital. From then on, Mary describes her homelife as “Not Right.”
The narrative jumps back in time to the stories of her mother and father. Charlie Marie Moore was a bright art student from New York City, who happened to find her way to Leechfield with her fourth husband, a sea-captain named Paolo. Mary explains how her mother, a Scarlet O’Hara look-alike, mysteriously abandoned her previous husband to marry J.P. Karr, a dark, scruff man and an employee of Gulf Oil. Though she doesn’t completely understand why her mother and father married, she believes that her mother married because she was “scared” from racking up “a frightening number of husbands.” In total, Charlie would marry seven times throughout her life, including two marriages to J.P.
As a young girl, Mary learns her family history by joining her father, J.P., at the bar of the American Legion or in the back room of Fisher’s Bait Shop. There, he and his friends drink and share stories, mostly tall tales about themselves and their families. Mary recounts how she was the only child, and girl, allowed in these meetings. Her father was a prolific storyteller who “told the best stories,” enrapturing her and his friends. One of these men’s wives dubs these meetings “The Liars’ Club,” because the stories are so frequently exaggerated. In one instance, J.P. tells the story of how his father hanged himself despite the fact that his father is still very much alive. Her mother’s history, however, remains more enigmatic and mysterious. She does not know much about her mother, and she describes her visits to Lubbock as unpleasant, which is where Charlie’s mother, Grandma Moore, lives.
While at first Charlie and J.P.’s union is happy, eventually things begin to fall apart. Charlie gives birth to the two girls, and while they are still young, Charlie drinks excessively. J.P. takes on two to three jobs at a time in the Texas oilfield to escape fights with his wife. Charlie is prone to extreme mood swings—one day, she’s sick in bed, and the next, she’s violently berating her family. Their fighting becomes so aggressive that the girls often hear crashing sounds or bodies hitting the linoleum in the kitchen.
Grandma, whom Mary detests, is diagnosed with cancer and comes to live with the family. This only aggravates tensions in the house and causes a greater rift between Charlie and her daughters. Grandma causes, in Mary’s opinion, some of the most divisive events in the household. She is a religious fanatic who forces the two girls to take nightly baths and to eat dinner properly, instead of on the bed which is where they normally eat. Grandma critiques Charlie’s and J.P.’s parenting styles and believes Mary and Lecia should receive beatings for misbehaving. Grandma gets her leg amputated, a scene which...
(This entire section contains 1171 words.)
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scars Mary. She recounts watching the doctors spreading mustard gas through her grandma’s leg and watching her grandmother scream in agony. After the amputation, Grandma calls Lecia "Belinda," and both girls are confused.
The men from the Liars’ Club come to the Karrs’ home to build a bedroom in the garage for J.P. and Charlie, to free up a room in the house for Grandma to die in peacefully. They transform the garage into a bedroom and studio, where Charlie paints a portrait of her mother. Grandma returns from the hospital, more frightening than ever.
Grandma’s return and an unstable and turbulent home life cause Mary and Lecia to act out. They are like “savages.” At twelve, Lecia can beat up any fifteen-year-old neighborhood boy. In school, Mary gets into fights, uses vulgar language (which she learns from her parents), and is suspended for fighting other children. Mary begins to sleepwalk, and she gets suspended from second grade twice, the first time for biting another student and the second, for hitting someone on the head with a ruler.
Although Mary and Lecia are small, they are able to stand up to the boys in the neighborhood. The neighborhood kids create a sort of “tribe.” However, one day, while Mary is only seven years old, an older boy from the neighborhood takes her into a garage and rapes her. Afterwards, he walks her home and drops her off on the porch. J.P. brings her inside and prepares her some food. Mary is too afraid to tell her father; she knows that if he knew, J.P. would have “gutted this boy like a fish.”
Instead of simply taking morphine, Grandma drinks beer excessively to ease the pain of her leg amputation and her cancer, which has spread to her brain. Mary is extremely afraid of Grandma and her eccentric behavior, and she notices that even Charlie grows tired of Grandma’s constant nagging and criticism. Grandma convinces Charlie to spank Mary, although Mary describes Charlie’s spanking as “pathetic.” Grandma becomes more and more senile, and frequently berates Mary for being a spoiled, ungrateful child.
In one instance, Grandma comes home with industrial rubber tubing that she braids with leather strips. She tells Charlie to hit Mary with this contraption, and for the first time in her life, Charlie refuses her mother. Grandma also shows Mary a photo of two children, Tex and Belinda, who she says are Mary’s half brother and sister. Mary recognizes the name Belinda, but doesn’t understand what the photo means. Later, Grandma threatens Mary that if she doesn’t behave and listen to her mother, she will be sent away.
Hurricane Carla heads toward Leechfield, and the family must decide whether to evacuate. Grandma refuses to leave until a National Guardsman has to pick her up and hoist her away. The girls try to reach J.P., who is in the oil fields, but he does not respond, and the family must leave without him. Grandma, Charlie, Lecia, and Mary head west to Aunt Iris’s house in Kirbyville, Texas. While in Kirbyville, Mary finds her grandmother lying on the bed, ants crawling up her arms and drinking spilled cough syrup off her arms. Mary believes her dead.
Chapters 5-8 Summary
J.P. watches from a crow’s nest as the hurricane barely misses Leechfield. Meanwhile, Mary discovers that Grandma was only comatosed. The family returns to Leechfield once the hurricane passes where Grandma eventually dies. Lecia, who is the peacemaker of the family, mourns Grandma’s death. However, Mary is so happy that she has to restrain from singing “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” out loud. Charlie drives to Lubbock to bury her mother at the funeral.
When Charlie returns, she takes the girls to the beach where J.P. goes seining, a form of fishing using a large net. They see a hammerhead fish, and Lecia is stung by a man-of-war. When they return back home, Lecia charges the neighbor kids a nickel to see the welts on her leg.
The Karrs’ homelife only worsens, and fights between Charlie and J.P. become more rampant. Charlie drinks even more extremely, buying vodka by the case. On one occasion—Mary’s birthday—the family goes out to the Bridge City Cafe to celebrate. Charlie and J.P. had fought earlier in the evening, and on their way back to the house, Charlie screams that she wishes she had died before ever marrying J.P. She then attempts to grab hold of the steering wheel to drive the car off a bridge. The two girls huddle in the backseat in fear, and J.P. successfully stops his wife by knocking her out. When Charlie finally wakes up in the driveway of their home, she scratches J.P.’s face with her nails and draws blood.
Part 1 is bookended by the event that introduced it. In a moment Mary would attempt to forget for the next three decades, Charlie drinks herself into madness. She covers all the mirrors in the house with her lipstick, and she lights her kids’ prized possessions, books, and clothes on fire. Although the two girls are terrified, they are too afraid to ask their neighbors for help, worried as they are to leave their mother alone in this state. Their mother drags their mattress off the bed, all the while looking like a “bona fide maniac.” She wields a twelve-inch butcher knife and begins to close in on the two girls. Lecia tells Mary to stay silent, and right as Mary is about to scream, Charlie stops and drops the knife. She goes to the phone, calls Dr. Boudreaux, and tells them that she has stabbed her two children. Help arrives and Charlie is taken to a mental hospital. These events—and the subsequent departure of her mother—only traumatize Mary further. She rebels by shooting a boy with a BB gun and seriously injuring him.
Curious about her mother, Mary tries to ask her father what is wrong and why she is in a psych ward. J.P. is reticent and simply says that psych wards are not for kids. Mary is persistent in her questioning, and finally J.P. agrees to take the girls to visit their mother. At the ward, Mary tells her mother she loves her. Once she sees her mom, the insomnia that had been plaguing her is instantly cured.
