Search Results

“... I am not very successful as a little girl,’ Mary Karr wrote in her diary when she was 11. ‘When I grow up, I will probably be a mess.’ This is how Cherry, the second instalment in her account of her early life, begins. The first, The Liars’ Club, was published in 1995. Now it is the summer before she enters sixth grade; she has no friends, her parents are out at work and her older sister is busy being a blonde goddess ...”

“... using the excuse and genre of the confession to write a memoir, to relive his lies one more time. Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club is subtitled ‘a memoir’. It opens with a quote from R.D. Laing: ‘We have our secrets and our needs to confess. We may remember ... what an accomplishment it was when we, in fear and trembling, could tell our first ...”

“... teaching fiction at Emerson College in Boston; Syracuse, where he went to be close to the poet Mary Karr; Bloomington-Normal for his first secure position at Illinois State; and finally Pomona College, in Claremont, California, where he killed himself in 2008 at the age of 46. He emerged as a writer from a university-based avant-garde tradition, but ...”

“... The portal has censured Wallace for his mawkish depictions of trans people, for stalking Mary Karr and for being the patron saint of pedantic male suitors since 1996. But they share a keen ear for the language of American commercial dross (‘LOOSE, HOT SLOTS’, a sign in Ohio reads), and what Lockwood’s narrator finds in the hospital is a ...”

“... only so long as it stood as a challenge. That’s​ what it was. In 2018 the poet and memoirist Mary Karr, who had been briefly involved with Wallace in the early 1990s, took to Twitter and accused D.T. Max of understating Wallace’s abusive behaviour towards her in his biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. The mode suddenly switched from ...”

“... into anything I knew about David was a story about him trying to buy a gun to kill the husband of Mary Karr, a poet he was infatuated with. It’s a dramatic tale and one David apparently recounted to several people. I can imagine him creating a narrative that showed how obsessed he was with this poet and also gave him a tough guy persona around the ...”

“... of the book, reflecting the satisfaction of an author who believes he has steered the Queen Mary into port. And why wouldn’t he have felt all pink and pleased? At nine hundred pages, Philip Roth: The Biography delivers the surplus goods, as if subscribing to the notion that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Each paragraph is as firmly packed as ...”