People like Mary Karr

Mary Karr (born January 16, 1955) is an American poet, essayist and memoirist from East Texas. She is widely noted for her 1995 bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.

Karr's memoir The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It explores her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. Karr was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart.

She followed the book with a second memoir, Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood.