Karr's parents meet when her mother stops at a gas station to fix a flat tire while fleeing her fourth husband.

Karr's maternal grandmother arrives in Leechfield to live with the family, bringing her terminal illness, her tyranny, and her demands for order.

A teenage neighborhood ringleader leads seven-year-old Karr into an abandoned garage and rapes her.

Grandmother privately shows Karr a locket holding photos of two half-siblings whose existence Karr has never known.

The family flees Hurricane Carla in a car that terrifyingly spins out of control on a high bridge during the evacuation.

Karr's grandmother dies shortly after the family returns to Leechfield, and principal Frank Doleman drives the girls home from school to tell them.

During a fight over birthday expenses, Karr's mother hurls the pot of birthday lasagna out the window at her departing father.

Karr's mother grabs the wheel and attempts to drive the family car off the Orange Bridge; her father punches her unconscious to stop her.

Karr's mother throws the family's possessions into a bonfire on the front lawn and then advances on her daughters with a knife.

Karr's mother calls an ambulance on herself, tells the doctor she has killed her children, and is committed to a psychiatric ward.

The Karr family impulsively stops during a road trip and buys a Colorado mountain cabin, funded entirely by the mother's oil inheritance.

Karr's parents announce their divorce; the father moves back to Texas while the girls choose to remain with their mother.

After their mother nearly shoots Hector one night, Lecia calls their father and asks him to arrange plane tickets back to Texas.

Karr's father suffers a stroke and Karr leaves her adult life in Boston to return home and help care for him.

Over margaritas, Karr's mother reveals how she lost her first two children when her husband disappeared with them in New York.

Mary Karr's memoir traces the volatile marriage of her parents, who met at a Texas gas station when her mother was fleeing one husband and heading toward another. Her childhood in Leechfield unfolds against escalating violence, including her rape by a neighborhood boy and the slow, oppressive decline of her dying grandmother. Her mother's psychosis builds to a terrifying crisis in which she burns the family's possessions, threatens her daughters with a knife, and has herself committed to a psychiatric ward. Released from the institution, her mother uses her inherited oil money to move the family impulsively to Colorado, where the marriage finally collapses into divorce and a disastrous remarriage follows. Years later, Karr returns to Texas to care for her stroke-stricken father, and the memoir closes when her mother finally reveals the hidden grief — the loss of two children from an earlier marriage — that drove decades of self-destruction.

The headline events of Mary Karr's turbulent Texas childhood and her mother's breakdown.

Karr's father regularly gathers with his drinking friends for domino games and storytelling at meetings that earn the name the Liars' Club.

After a fight with their father, Karr's mother drives the girls toward Lubbock through a terrifying storm of locusts blanketing their car.

The Liars' Club men build Karr's mother a painting studio in the backyard, which Karr sneaks into to study her mother's progress.

Karr's mother quits her newspaper reporting job to spend almost all of her time tending to her dying mother at the hospital.

Karr's grandmother returns from the hospital with a prosthetic leg after her cancerous leg has been amputated, remaining bossy and tyrannical.

Karr finds safety running freely with the neighborhood pack of children, feeling a rare sense of belonging outside her chaotic home.

On a gloomy post-hurricane beach trip, Lecia wades too far out and is wrapped around the leg by a man-of-war jellyfish.

At a Liars' Club gathering, Karr's father tells a tall tale claiming his still-living father died in a preposterous accidental hanging.

On Father's Day, Lecia tries to call their absent father by phone while Karr obsessively collects Green Stamps to send him a gift.

Karr's mother starts taking diet pills, reads French existentialist philosophy aloud, and tells her daughters that suicide is sometimes the sanest choice.

While home alone with a fever, Karr is befriended and then sexually molested by a neighborhood acquaintance.

When Hector speaks disrespectfully to Karr's mother in the Leechfield driveway, her father suddenly attacks and brutally beats him.

Karr's mother returns to Karr's father the same evening after driving the badly beaten Hector to a hospital.

During lucid spells in the hospital, Karr's father furiously berates his daughters for abandoning him by going away to fancy schools.

Karr's father's former commanding officer Colonel Pierce visits and shares wartime stories, including a bayonet scar Karr had never once asked about.

Behind the headline traumas of Mary Karr's childhood lies a dense texture of secondary moments — the Liars' Club sessions that first taught her the power of storytelling, her mother's quiet sacrifice in quitting work to nurse her dying grandmother, and her grandmother's grotesque physical decline. After the grandmother's death, the family makes a dispiriting trip to a hurricane-ravaged beach where Lecia is nearly strangled by a man-of-war. In the Colorado years, the girls live largely unsupervised, coping with an experimental school, a second molestation, and a Father's Day spent trying in vain to reach an absent father from a phone booth. The family's return to Texas brings a violent confrontation when Karr's father beats their stepfather Hector in the driveway. The memoir's final chapters circle back to the father's physical decline, during which lucid outbursts of anger sit alongside the revelations of a visiting wartime commanding officer.

The secondary scenes and quieter moments that textured life in the Karr household.

The memoir opens with young Karr being examined by a doctor at night while neighbors gawk outside and her mother has been taken away.

Karr sneaks into her mother's studio and on impulse smears orange paint across the finished portrait of her grandmother.

Returning home from school, Karr discovers her mother has broken every mirror in the house and smeared them with lipstick.

Karr finds a lawyer's letter at home detailing the large sum of oil money her mother has inherited from her grandmother's land.

Karr finds her mother alone in the art studio, silently feeding her dead mother's old correspondence into the stove.

Karr's father drives the girls to the psychiatric facility to visit their mother, who speaks to them through a heavily screened window.

Karr and Lecia discover horseback riding at a Colorado stable, finding it to be the greatest joy of their otherwise dark Colorado years.

The day after their father leaves for Texas, their mother takes the girls to a luxury hotel in Denver, where Karr is overwhelmed by grief.

Karr's mother returns from a trip to Acapulco with Hector the bartender rather than Ray, displaying a diamond ring and announcing she has remarried.

Karr's mother announces she has purchased a bar in a failing mining town called Antelope and moves the whole family there.

An older student named Bertha beats up Karr at the Antelope school; recuperating, Karr imagines her absent father's coaching voice and steady presence.

Karr and Lecia attempt to reclaim their horses with two helpless men; the frightened animals flee and the attempt fails completely.

A drunken Joey puts the girls on the wrong connecting flight and they land in Mexico City; airport workers eventually escort them to Texas.

The girls have an emotional reunion with their father; that night Karr hears him crying in the dark and praying for their mother to return.

While searching the attic for army papers, Karr finds her grandmother's prosthetic leg and a box containing her mother's old wedding rings.

The Liars' Club opens in the aftermath of a violent event that Karr cannot yet fully recall, establishing from the start that its central drama is the uncovering of hidden truths. Karr's early act of defacing her mother's portrait, and her later discovery of the smashed mirrors and burning mail, map a family that communicates through destruction rather than words. A screened-window visit to her institutionalized mother crystallizes the emotional distance between them, while Colorado briefly offers joy through horseback riding before the family's situation worsens under Hector's influence. The move to a bleak mining town, a failed attempt to reclaim their horses, and a chaotic misdirected flight home chart the girls' gradual escape from their mother's orbit and return to their grieving father. The pool ends in the attic, where a prosthetic leg and a set of wedding rings lead Karr to the conversation that finally unlocks her mother's most devastating secret.

The discoveries, confrontations, and emotional breaks that reframe the Karr family story.