45 pages • 1 hour read
Mary KarrThe Liars' Club
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Grandma Moore’s Prosthetic Leg
In Chapter 15 of The Liars’ Club, Karr comes upon her grandmother’s prosthetic leg while searching through her family’s attic for something else. Although she is now a grown woman, and her grandmother is long gone, the sight of the leg still startles and frightens her, almost as if it were an actual, cut-off limb. She is so flustered that she drops the trunk in which the leg is lying: “Maybe a coiled rattler weaving its head and shaking out a rasp would’ve panicked me more, but I doubt it” (312). Karr’s panicked reaction has its roots in her family history.
The leg is a symbol of her grandmother’s lengthy illness, which kept her in the Karr family house; at the same time, it is also a symbol of her grandmother’s uncanny potency and staying power. Karr remembers her grandmother’s ferocity as only increasing with each successive phase of her cancer, as if her illness gave her strength rather than diminished her. Her grandmother was able to transform many of the trappings of her illness, moreover, into instruments of terror and intimidation. For instance, her wheelchair allowed her to move soundlessly through the house, and therefore to sneak up on Karr and her sister: “She had a habit of sneaking up on Lecia and me and shouting Aha! as if she’d discovered us shooting up heroin with a turkey baster or eviscerating some small animal” (61). Karr remembers her grandmother’s artificial leg, meanwhile, as standing detached outside of her bed at nights, like a walking stick, and “casting a long shadow into the hall” (60).
It is therefore not surprising that the prosthetic leg should strike Karr as strangely, malevolently alive—like a snake—even detached from its now-deceased owner. Her formative memory of her grandmother, during her long-illness, was as someone not quite human: someone whose willfulness and viciousness seemed even more powerful than death. In this way, the prosthetic leg is also a symbol of trauma and loss, and how that trauma is processed, or not processed, through memory.
Horseback Riding
Karr remembers the Colorado period of her childhood as a generally lost, dark time, during which her parents divorced, her father subsequently moved back to Texas, and her mother—left alone—spiraled out further into alcoholism and decrepitude. The one consolation of this time, as she remembers, was her and her sister Lecia’s discovery of horseback riding: “If there’s a particular joy that marks that whole dark Colorado time, it starts and ends with those horses” (184).
Karr loves everything about horseback riding, from the riding itself to the tending to and bridling up of horses: “From my first whiff of that stall every morning […] I drew enough horse up into my lungs to be some form of drunk on it” (184). In many ways, horseback riding provides Karr and her sister with some of the care and structure that their mother has failed to give them, while also being an escape from their turbulent household. Riding horses is one time when they are able to use their unsupervised state to their advantage and to be wild in a way that is thrilling and romantic rather than simply frightening. They ride high up into the mountains and explore the varied and dramatic Colorado landscape. They the kind of freedom afforded to boys—the freedom to lose themselves in their surroundings. The sense of release that Karr feels while horseback riding is similar, in some ways, to what she remembers feeling while running through Leechfield as a 7-year-old with a pack of other neighborhood children. While the two landscapes are very different, and while one activity is crowded and sociable and the other is quiet and isolated, Karr finds in both activities a soothing escape from herself and the solace of pure animal motion: “[T]here was something almost sacred about that pack of kids we got folded into […] the sheer velocity of running across a wet field with other kids felt safe” (63).
As Karr is eventually cut out of the Leechfield herd of kids, however—due to the attentions of a bullying older boy—so she is eventually cut off from horseback riding. Her mother impulsively moves the family to the town of Antelope, which is farther up the mountains than the isolated cabin where they have been living, and which marks Karr’s first real initiation into Colorado social life. She and Lecia go to a strange experimental school and encounter the frighteningly jaded and indifferent kids there; they must also cope with the lost souls who frequent the bar that their mother owns and runs. By the time that Karr and Lecia are reunited with their horses, Karr is a little older and warier: the wariness of an adolescent girl who has realized that she must fend for herself. Her wariness causes her to register her old horse’s expression and to realize that the horse is panicked, rather than happy, to see her: “His expression was some equine way of saying not her again” (229).
Defaced Paintings
In Chapter 3 of The Liars’ Club, Karr defaces one of her mother’s paintings, squirting a tube of orange paint on to it. Although she later allows her action to be blamed on mysterious local vandals, she does not seem to have intended vandalism herself; rather, she seems to have been trying to improve or somehow deepen the painting, which is a portrait of her grandmother: “Maybe I was trying to blot her out somehow, or shut her up. If you’d asked me, I would have said I was trying to brighten her lipstick” (60).
Karr’s grandmother has recently died, and her mother seems lost to her grieving; she is not expressive in her grief, but absent and remote. The portrait of Grandma Moore is similarly inexpressive, as if her mother has felt somehow watched by Grandma Moore in trying to paint her image: “The portrait of Grandma wound up stiffer, more formal than her other work, which was wildly expressionistic” (60). In smearing orange paint on the portrait, then, Karr may be trying to break through some of her mother’s frustrating remoteness. She may also be imposing herself on a part of her mother’s life—that of her art-making—that is usually closed off to her.
Karr herself will grow up to be an artist, although of a different kind than her mother. In this light, her defacing of her mother’s painting has a certain symbolic resonance, showing the inquisitiveness and the audacity that is required to make any sort of art.
Venomous Snakes
Leechfield, Texas is a dank, swampy landscape, which is full of water moccasins, along with other fearsome creatures. These moccasins appear frequently in this memoir, both literally and as symbols. While searching through her family’s attic, Karr notes that her sister’s attic was once infested with water moccasins; later, coming upon her grandmother’s prosthetic leg, she declares that a poisonous snake could hardly have scared her more. Moccasins—or rather, the smell of them—also appear earlier in the book, when Karr is trapped alone with her dying grandmother in Chapter 4. Her grandmother’s smell, which she later understands to be the smell of illness and death, reminds her of the smell of water moccasins: “It’s not just the smell of death, but the smell of something thriving on death, a smell you link up to maggots, or those bacteria that eat up corpses one cell at a time” (77).
Her grandmother has cornered her in order to tell her about Tex and Belinda, her two half-siblings, whose existence she later finds out more about from her visit to her family’s attic. While water moccasins are very much of a literal presence in this book, then, they can also be seen as symbols, representing how the suppression of dark truths may result in a rotting smell, yet will have a startling slithery force when brought out into the light.
