SOURCE: Young, Elizabeth. “Wrecked in Texas.” New Statesman and Society 8, no. 375 (20 October 1995): 39-40.

In the following review, Young commends The Liars' Club as a “extraordinarily vivid and beautifully written” memoir, noting that the work transcends the traditionally “salacious” subject material of the American memoir.

Intellectuals are as prurient as anyone else. They are just as interested in murder, sex and disease but they don't much like to admit it. They scorn tabloids and talk shows. Egg-head voyeurism is catered for in up-market biographies and films that focus on the scandals of the Bloomsbury Group, Anais Nin, Henry Miller and their like—or in books whose concern for the ecosystem, the homeless, the missing or addicted enables the educated to wallow guiltlessly in repulsive descriptions of Ebola disease, true-crime atrocities or appalling deprivations.

Mary Karr's memoir, [The Liars' Club,] which arrives accompanied by sheaves of ecstatic US reviews, is...