Word: karr
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...early riser, so the first two or three hours of my vacation mornings were spent getting the news from the likes of Maxwell, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Tobias Wolff, Frank Conroy, Alice Adams, Stewart O'Nan, Charles Baxter--short stories and novels--and from Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, a memoir so rich it might be a novel...
...have no desire to become Big Brother," counters Rob Karr of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association. He points out that the law forbids taped conversations from being passed on to third parties and requires employers to gain permission before they eavesdrop. But the Illinois law is unclear whether that means telling employees each time they plan to listen or issuing just a one-time blanket warning. As for bosses who stumble into private conversations, Karr says if a worker is doing personal business on company time, bosses "probably have the right to be listening...
Nevertheless, readers seem to be responding. Mary Karr, whose chronicle of family chaos in East Texas, The Liars' Club (Viking; 320 pages; $22.95), was a surprise best seller earlier this year, discovered an "incredible kinship" with audiences on a tour of public readings from her book. "They were people from every walk of American life--bankers, professors, laborers, blacks, whites, literates and illiterates. Afterward they came up to the stage to tell me about childhoods far worse than mine, or some terrible family secret and how they were able to go on living and loving despite it. I learned that...
...there may be fair warning here that the author is a club member too. Would-be writers cursed with the thin childhood material of loving parents and sensible households may suspect a touch of exaggeration when, more or less safely delivered into adulthood, Karr rummages in the family attic. She's looking for the six or seven wedding rings from her mother's rumored but stubbornly unacknowledged previous marriages. What she finds is the artificial leg of her despised dead grandmother...
Character takes firm hold in this wondering account of fistfights and flood, car crashes, shootings, midnight departures, drinking and mulligrubbing. It's not all funny. There are a couple of childhood rapes and too many mornings of a mother hung over and useless. But Karr and her sister Lecia survive-Lecia to marry and turn Republican, Karr to be a poet (with such collections as The Devil's Tour) and to write a drop-dead reply to the question "Ma, what was it like when you were a little girl...