SOURCE: Selinger, Eric Murphy. “This Personal Maze Is Not the Prize.” Parnassus 24, no. 2 (2000): 77-116.

In the following essay, Selinger offers a critical reading of The Liars' Club within the context of the prose memoir genre and in conjunction with Karr's poetry volume Viper Rum and her literary essay “Against Decoration.”

Five years ago, with The Liars' Club still reeling at the view from its lofty perch on the Times bestseller list, Mary Karr offered the readers of Parnassus “A Memoirist's Apology.” What was she apologizing for? Not the book's success—it could scarcely have been published when the essay was composed. Nor, Lord knows, did she need our forgiveness for anything in the book: the portraits of her haunted mother, or her rough and tender father, or herself. Rather, like John Henry Newman facing his Anglican past in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Karr needed to explain to her...