In
the memoir ‘The Liar’s Club”, Mary Karr recalls back to when she is seven,
experiencing the most traumatic event in her life. Living in Leechfield, one of
the “the ugliest towns on the planet”, Karr grew up in poison- infested
environment with a family full of violence, dislocation, and fragmentation.
During the first half of the book, Karr introduces her mom by describing how
she was taken away to a mental institution due to her nervous breakdowns. With her grandma suffering from cancer
and her father becoming an alcoholic, Kerr and her little sister is left
neglected and goes from door to door, begging for a meal. By including similes,
Kerr displays the emotions she encountered during her brutal childhood experiences
as well as her complex thoughts.
In
the beginning of the book, Kerr only has broken pieces of her memory from a
tragic event. She can only describe this indescribable moment with similes that
help readers grasp her emotions. As she recalls back to when she discovered a
fuzzy memory of being assisted out of her house by the police, she says it felt
like the moment “a crystal ball that whirls from a foggy blur into focus” (14).
Once she can no longer piece her stories back together, she compares her frustration
to a ghost and how “like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school
blackboard, the ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness”
(25). With the use of similes, Kerr displays her complex emotions as well as
her inner conflicts.
It
is undeniable that Kerr’s use of figurative language, such as simile, makes her
memoir dramatic, portraying the great warmth and pain that built her strong sense
of self. The gritty eloquence of her voice incorporated in her similes gave me
vivid pictures and left me speechless.
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