SOURCE: Pinsker, Sanford. “Citizens of Somewhere Else: Memoir and the Place of Place.” Georgia Review 55, no. 1 (spring 2001): 162-69.

In the following essay, Pinsker examines a selection of recent memoirs, including The Liars' Club, and comments that a strong sense of place is a key element to a successful memoir. Pinsker additionally compliments Karr's “deliciously vernacular voice” in The Liars' Club.

Krochmalna Street in pre-World War I Warsaw … Leechfield, Texas, in the 1970's … an Alexandria, Egypt, that abides in the imagination—these are the times and places that fuel the respective memoirs of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Mary Karr, and André Aciman. Unfortunately, their books arrive at a time cluttered with accounts of how X was victimized and how Y managed to survive. Indeed, that is why the place of place serves as a useful way of distinguishing these artists from the anybodies with a lurid story to spill on...