Mary Karr Books In Order

Publication Order of The Liars' Club Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Mary Karr Poems Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Mary Karr is an award-winning memoirist, poet, songwriter, and essayist from East Texas. She was born and raised in Texas and has authored many critically acclaimed works of fiction and poetry.

She made her debut with the publishing of the poetry collection “Abacus,” which came out in 1987. Her first memoir was the 2018 “Tropic of Squalor,” which was a trilogy that included “Lit,” “Cherry,” and “The Liar’s Club.”
Her prose and poetry frequently come with autobiographical elements such as adult alcoholism, her hardscrabble childhood, a failed marriage, teenage drug use, and her subsequent recovery from drug addiction and conversion to Catholicism.
While her work is often on brutal subject matter, it has received a lot of praise for its beauty and lyricism. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times called “The Liars Club” her breakthrough memoir a powerful tool of language.
She said that the author wields this tool with earthy and lyric poetry that is unlike any other.

Karr came into her own when she published “Against Decoration” her Pushcart-winning essay that would garner a lot of controversy. In this article, she criticized the excessive verbal ornament that is found in poetry.
But it would be with the publication of “The Liar’s Club” in 1995 that she would become very famous. The work documented her tough upbringing and it won nonfiction prizes from the Texas Institute of Letters and PEN.

It was this work that would kickstart a revolution as she became a bestselling memoir author. The work also became a bestselling title in the New York Times for more than a year and a best book on the likes of Time, People, and The New Yorker.
She would then follow that up with several bestselling memoirs that recounted her tumultuous coming-to-age and teenage years. She also documented her descent into the chaos of madness and alcoholism in her work “Lit.”
In 2015, she published “The Art of the Memoir” the bestselling work in which she tells of her experiences as a black belt sinner, therapy patient, recovered alcoholic, writer, and spiritual seeker.
The author provides insights into the art and mechanics of form that is as entertaining, insightful, and irreverent as her own work in the genre.

As for how she started writing, Mary Karr has asserted that writing is something that she always wanted to do from a very early age. When she read her first poem as a child, she was touched by a burning taper that set her alight, even though she was just a kid.

Karr is also a songwriter who has collaborated with the likes of Lucinda Williams, Norah Jones, and Rodney Crowell among several others on “KIN,” the country album.
She has also become a sought-after speaker who often gives talks at writers’ festivals, libraries, and prestigious universities all over the globe. Karr is also a regular contributor to the likes of “Poetry Magazine,” “The Atlantic,” and “The New Yorker.”

She still works a day job at Syracuse University as a Peck Professor of Literature and makes her home in New York City.

Mary Karr’s “The Liar’s Club” is a work that tells of part of the author’s childhood growing up in a refinery on the coast of Texas and then during the 1960s when she lived in Colorado.
Her childhood was more weird than good in that she was brought up in a very dysfunctional family. Her mother was married several times and was a neurotic that considered herself a failed New York artist.
There is also the cancer-ridden authoritarian grandmother and the father who loved to take her to the “liar’s club.” This was a group of card-playing, drinking, and tall tale-telling friends.
As such, Karr tells of the Bohemian home life and the many brushes her family had with hurricane and road deaths, the parental drinking binges, the prying neighbors, sudden house movies, and school fights.
It all comes out as a heart-wringing and tough tale that conveys much of the optimism usually found in a coming-of-age story.

This is a work that has been compared to “Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt as just like its predecessor, it describes a bleak childhood in positive and tender times.
Having gone through some very terrible experiences including rape, this is a testimony to the stoicism, resilience, and humor of Karr and her indomitable sister.

In “Lit” by Mary Karr, the work picks up from where the debut left off. Cherry is in her late teens and is best described as a wandering girl who is looking for respectability when she is not on drugs or alcohol.
The work journeys into the character’s early poetic and literary life as she gets married to a handsome man from a family with old money.

This action catapults her into the well-to-do upper classes where she hopes to finally escape her gritty Texas shame. Her father whom she adored and loved was given to drinking and in a psychotic fit, her mother had once tried to kill all her children.

The author pens her story with laconic wit as she described her own willful meanness, ignorance, and the wounds she inflicts on Dev her son, and her husband. She provides insights into her fight with alcoholism hell, even as she seethes with self-hatred.

She stumbles into furtive prayers and attends alcoholics anonymous but this does not seem enough, as she seems hell-bent on self-destruction.
It is a work that critics from the “New York Times” said hogties readers’ emotions and won’t let them go from the first page to the last.

“Cherry” by Mary Karr is the sequel to the previous work on a childhood spent in a defiantly loving but volatile family.

This work focuses on her adolescent years as she is seen struggling as a talented child of a dismissive and sullen father and an unstable and ethereal mother, who disappears from time to time even as she studies art on the side.
Most of the time, she is more of a friend to Mary her child rather than a parent, and even encourages her to engage in sexual activities.

At some point, Mary gets arrested during a drug raid and her mother gets her out by charming an old admirer who is the judge in the case.

Writing in the second person, the author tells the story of her childhood friendships which were very tenuous, her chaotic move into adolescence, and her experimenting with sex.
She often had trouble with school authority and often found her escape in language and in books.

At some point, she was so frustrated with her dysfunctional family that she tried to commit suicide but ultimately resolved to live as she felt she had not eaten enough plums.
She moves effortlessly from laugh out loud to heart-stopping and to breathtaking to make for a beautiful and astounding work.