The Liars' Club

This chapter jumps ahead 17 years from the time of the last chapter. Karr is an adult and has left home—first to go to college in Minnesota and then to live in Boston—and her father has had a stroke. She goes back home to Texas to tend to him and to help out her mother, who will stay with Karr’s father for the rest of his life.

She remembers visiting her father at the Legion, while she was home on a break from college. This visit, during which they played pool and Karr witnessed her father get into a drunken fight with another patron, marked one of the last times that Karr accompanied her father to his male-dominated enclaves. She also relates that she stopped going to Liars’ Club meetings once she became an adolescent, and her father’s friends began to treat her differently, as an awkward female interloper. A new distance opened up between Karr and her father after these changes: “[O]ver the years, Daddy and I became abstract to each other” (286).

Karr remembers trying to get her father to stop drinking, but making no progress. He simply tells her that he doesn’t care whether drinking is destroying his health or not, and she is frightened by the flat, resigned look in his eyes: “He was unknown to me, and unknowable, though I sensed inside him during that time a darkness so large and terrible that perhaps his last gift to me was trying to shield me from it, and his last failure was that he couldn’t entirely do so” (291).