During my research of Mary Karr’s 1995 memoir, The Liars’ Club, I have come across several articles that focus on the work’s use of non-traditional autobiographical techniques in order to give voice to subjects that have historically been problematic for the life writing genre to engage in discourse with or even to simply voice as an issue. In particular, critics seem very interested as to where Karr’s text falls within the spectrum of the autobiography and as to how its use of invention informs the ethos of the narrator. The work itself is often referred to as a literary memoir and, along with Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, has become emblematic of this genre’s use of novelistic techniques like selective inclusion, exclusion, and even exaggeration or manipulation of details that have traditionally been overlooked in autobiography as a whole. This genre is often described as a hybrid genre between fiction and non-fiction that acts to blur the lines between the two and in doing so giving rise to questions about the reliability of memory and whether the importance of an autobiographic text lies in the literal truth of a situation or in the emotional truth that the memoirist is trying to capture through the act of writing. Continue reading →