Mary Karr TALKS ABOUT THE ONGOING SUCCESS OF "THE LIARS' CLUB," THE MEMOIR BACKLASH AND SETTLING SCORES. BY DWIGHT GARNER | one of the great joys of Mary Karr's memoir "The Liars' Club" is reading about what an adept little shit-kicker she was. By the age of 8, this East Texan was a world-class settler of scores, whether that meant biting the hell out of some kid who had wronged her or shinnying up a tree with a BB gun in order to pump lead into an entire offending family. "I was small-boned and skinny," Karr writes, "but more than able to make up for that with sheer meanness." At 42, Mary Karr is still small-boned and skinny. And -- to my general discomfort -- she is still willing to do some shit-kicking. "I'd rather take a whuppin' than do one more goddamned interview," Karr barks at me when I meet her in a New York hotel lobby, her dark eyes shooting out little cartoon sparks of pique. (Karr's features are so compact and well-defined that she looks like an Al Hirschfeld sketch.) "I feel like I've been lashed to the mast," she says, reeling off the list of appointments and appearances she's already logged today. Karr leads me into the hotel's restaurant, where her fiancé, British publisher Peter Strauss, is waiting. Strauss' presence partly explains why she's upset: This lunch turns out to be the first chance they've had to see each other in several days. For 45 minutes, they chew their food and cast longing glances at one another. I trot out my questions, hoping not to have any steamed vegetables flung in my direction. Karr is in demand right now for several reasons. For one thing, "The Liars' Club," published early in 1995, has come to be viewed as the book that jump-started the current memoir explosion. For another, Karr and her publishers are celebrating the fact that "The Liars' Club" has been on paperback bestseller lists for almost exactly one year -- the book has gone back for 17 printings, and there are close to 400,000 copies in print. "You'd think people would be sick of me," Karr says. "I'm sick of myself." Yet she seems genuinely surprised at the book's ongoing success: "If you've been a poet for 20 years," she says, "you don't expect anybody to read anything you write." "The Liars' Club" deserves its wide audience. Karr is a shrewd, plucky and deeply observant storyteller, and she expertly spins out the details of her family's life in small-town Texas in the 1950s. Her mother was a kind of "Bohemian Scarlett O'Hara" whose wild streak (and seven marriages) shocked Karr's neighbors; a devoted parent, she would also be subject to destructive rages and psychotic episodes. Her father was a brawling oil worker, a generally taciturn man who came most fully alive when he told stories, spinning out whoppers with a group of men called "The Liars' Club." Karr's greatest achievement, though, is her ability to climb inside her own 8-year-old cranium. She evokes the landscape of a preadolescent mind with such exactitude -- fights, fears, petty jealousies -- that "The Liars' Club" stands as one of the best books ever written about growing up female (or growing up, period) in America. Karr escaped Texas at age 17, she has said, when she joined some surfers bound for California. She found her way to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where she spent two years before dropping out to travel. Karr later attended Vermont's Goddard Collage, where she studied with the writers Tobias Wolff and Frank Conroy, both of whom have been influential in her career. Karr married a fellow poet in 1983 -- they had a son, Dev, now 11 -- and divorced 10 years later. She has published two books of poetry, "The Devil's Tour" and "Abacus." She now lives with her son in upstate New York, and she teaches writing at Syracuse University. As our interview progressed, Karr's irritation gradually vanished. She talked about everything from the storm surrounding Kathryn Harrison's memoir "The Kiss" to her reasons for beginning to write "The Liars' Club" ("I literally needed the money") to her recent work on "Cherry," a forthcoming memoir of her teenage years. No vegetables were thrown. "The Liars' Club" was published two years ago, yet it's already regarded as the Ur-text of this so-called "memoir explosion." Are you surprised that this has become such a heated cultural battle? Well, I think memoir started with St. Augustine -- not with me, and not with Oprah. Memoir has an august, and inaugust, history. St. Augustine got drop-kicked for just using the first person pronoun at all. It was considered morally reprehensible. Memoir has long been what Geoffrey Wolff has called an "outsider's art." People want some sort of moral compass, and the subjective suddenly has power it hasn't had before because all of the measures of how we are doing -- the church, community life, religious or government leaders, certain kinds of values, family -- no longer mean what they once did. There are other people who have written memoirs -- Frank Conroy, Maya Angelou. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote a great memoir, "Woman Warrior." I think I'm the current ... (trails off). But I don't know why they don't call Richard Ford and bust his chops about all the Harlequin romances that are being published. Most of the memoirs are going to be bad, the way most novels are going to be bad, the way most articles are going to be bad, the way most poems are going to be bad. It's hard to make something of quality. You must feel like you're being blamed for creating a monster. Yeah, and I'm crying all the way to the bank. Toby Wolff did a great piece in the Times last Sunday where he said -- talking about James Wolcott (who wrote a strongly negative review of Harrison "The Kiss" in The New Republic) -- that Wolcott stood at the gates of literature as if to prevent any memoir from passing through. There is a history of genres or different forms (being discredited). A sonnet was seen as really low rent at one time among poets because it didn't have the sweep of an epic -- and it didn't have the rhetorical power of an epistle. The notion that something would be a little lyrical song, or that a novel was made up -- it was just fancy, sprung from someone's head -- was seen as morally reprehensible. It's odd that when a new genre emerges as interesting, the only way people choose to take it on is on some moral ground based on the notion that art is mimetic. No one calls up Don DeLillo and says, "What things about Lee Harvey Oswald did you make up and which ones are absolutely true?" They are fully accepting of freedom in that form. But I guess with memoirists choosing to use novelistic devices, these are fair questions for readers to ask. I read an interview in which you said that one or two of your father's "Liars' Club" stories in your book were, in fact, things you made up. They are pure fiction. They are absolutely made up. But they are not represented as truth in the book. I sort of defend doing it that way. They are seen as bullshit, and represented as bullshit in the book. The interesting things people have said -- you know, "Did your mother really shoot at your stepfather?" -- I've responded like, "I wouldn't make that up." Then I'm all morally outraged. But what do I expect? You sign up to play football and then you complain you've been hit?