Klub lhářů – Karrová Mary (2023)

Today, the cult work of American writer has been listed by The New York Times among the best memoirs of the last fifty years. This unsentimental, touching, and humorous narrative about an apocalyptic childhood has received numerous literary awards. The author lovingly reflects on her tumultuous life with alcoholic parents and an older sister. Her mother is a mentally unstable artist who married a worker at oil rigs in East Texas. She dominates the entire family with her fierce passions. She hates the town of Leechfield with its bigoted and boorish neighbors, where refineries and chemical plants flood the area with the smell of rotten eggs. Even nature is hostile here: snakes, voracious grasshoppers, tornadoes, and diseases resemble biblical plagues. The oil and cotton fields represent grueling labor. The only bright spot is the workers' pub, where men drink, play pool, and cheerfully lie. Karr is ruthlessly truthful, and the therapeutic effect of her book has elicited crowd reactions, especially from female readers, helping them to confront their own skeletons in the family closet. The author does not offer absolution, only the hope of a cleansing narrative, a bright sky above the toxic flames of chemicals lashing across the horizon of the Gulf of Mexico.