Ozersky is a critic and historian. In this essay, Ozersky looks at the fine line between memoir and novel—a line nowhere finer, he contends, than in The Liars' Club.

As a book, The Liars' Club was so good that it transcended its genre; reading it today, it's easy to forget how influential it was when it was published in 1995. The literary memoir has a long and noble history, but the late 1990s saw what had been a fairly marginal genre move into the center of the publishing world as one memoir succeeded another at the top of the bestseller lists. Books like Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Carolyn Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story, and David Sedaris's Naked sold like hotcakes, and their authors became major literary celebrities. But prior to the success of The Liars' Club, literary memoirs were much more of...