The Liars' Club

“Mother had been taken Away—he further told us—for being Nervous.”

This terse explanation that Karr receives about her mother’s breakdown, and subsequent hospitalization, shows both the discretion and the informality of her small Texas town. Rather than use a formal, clinical term like “psychotic breakdown,” the local sheriff uses the more understated word, “nervous.”: Karr explains how this word was frequently used in her town and among her Texas family to signify deranged and violent behavior. Karr’s capitalizing of the words “away” and “nervous” shows both the frequency with which these words are used and the unspoken difficult things that they are being made to represent.

“This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.”

Karr is referring here to her mother’s frightening breakdown, which she could not remember in full for years. In not disclosing everything about this breakdown right away, she recreates the effect of her trauma—and the compelling “blank spots” that it led to—in her book. It is a narrative strategy that creates suspense, while also being faithful to her emotional experience.

“The night’s major consequences for me were internal. The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on constant vigilance against various forms of Not Rightness.”

The judgments of conservative small-town neighbors are a constant presence and pressure in Karr’s childhood. As this quote demonstrates, she internalizes these judgments, applying them not only to her parents but to herself, and carries them around even when she is alone.