Pain Transformed by Humor and Poetry

Paper Summary:

The paper discusses two memoirs of childhood, "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt, set in Ireland, and "The Liar's Club" by Mary Karr about a girl's childhood in East Texas. The paper shows how these two memoirs share many common elements-- poetry, savage humor, great emotional pain, bad weather, the wonder of books, the joys and terrors of sex, and ultimately, the redemptive power of love. Above all, it shows that it is the humor that renders the unbearable both readable and even inspiring.

From the Paper:

"Liars' Club opens with a singularity rather than a mythic overview: "My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark." That frozen instant only unfolds over time it took three decades to unfreeze so that we realize that seven-year-old Mary, nicknamed Pokey, has been raped by a neighbor and at that moment is being examined by the family doctor. And yet the details of this girl's upbringing in a swampy Texas town (which, like Ireland, is beset with hurricanes and bad weather), with a drinking, lying, fabulating, mad, loving family also takes on a quality of the mythic, and achieves its power through humor and poetry."

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