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Throughout the book The Liar’s Club author Mary Karr undoubtedly uses many writing techniques to gain reader interest and strengthen her points, but I think she cleverly uses more than one technique to discretely show her feelings about events that will come. I think Mary Karr cleverly combines foreshadowing and explicitly graphic description to implant her thoughts and fears from childhood atrocities that she experienced.

From the very first sentence of the story Karr uses detailed description to foreshadow multiple events later on in the story.

“He wore a yellow golf shirt unbuttoned so that sprouts of hair showed in a V shape on his chest. I had never seen him in anything but a white starched shirt and a gray tie. The changed unnerved me. He was pulling at the hem of my favorite nightgown” (3)

This image right away makes your mind wonder what is going on. Whether a defense reaction or inquisitiveness many people automatically assume this is an image of sexual assault. We quickly find out this is not what is happening at all, in fact the man described above is the family doctor and he is there to help Karr not to hurt her. This instance has nothing to do with sexual assault, but subconsciously you gather a feeling that Karr has experienced some event in her life that would make her describe the situation as she did. I feel the way she wrote this was intended to make you feel suspicious of the doctor and for the readers to question the intentions of the doctor in this situation.

To support my earlier claim of foreshadowing throughout the book, I bring up a disturbingly graphic situation played out in chapter three.

“It was going dark when he got hold of me under God knows what pretext. He took me into somebody’s garage. He unbuttoned my white shirt and told me I was getting breast” (65).

This is the first instance in the book where Mary Karr is actually sexually abused. This image is what I think Karr was foreshadowing in those first few sentences. You can draw many similarities between these two images, which show Karr was thinking of this instance when she earlier described the doctor. The first thing that sticks out to me is Karr’s sense of detachment. While it is obvious Karr knows the doctor in the first scene she never refers to him as his name, she always uses “he” or “his”. She again uses this technique later on in the book when describing the rape scene she calls him “the big boy” or simply uses “he” or “his” again. Now we find out she doesn’t know her attacker very well ,she must have drawn similarities between the rape and of the doctor attempting to examine her later on, because of her obvious detachment during the period of trauma. This shows that Karr uses the image of the doctor to foreshadow what will happen later in the book.

The most disturbing instance of foreshadowed sexual abuse shows up toward the end of the book. This again shows the detachment similarity shown in the last two quotes, but this image uses disturbingly graphic imagery, imagery that is to descriptive and vulgar for me to comfortably repeat on here, in order to create a culmination of Karr’s feelings on these assaults

“This whole scene rushing through my head when the babysitter’s zipper hits bottom. His hand fishes into that zipper and farther, into the shadow of his shorts” (243).

This quote alone portrays a deeply disturbing situation unfolding, and also the only image from this part that I was comfortable repeating publicly. This again shows Karr’s detachment and change of tone when she recalls these instances of abuse. This also uses Karr’s extensive description which quite honestly sickened me and deterred me from blogging about this particular issue, but in the end I decided this was defiantly a very important, but underlying issue throughout the book.

I think Mary Karr cleverly combines foreshadowing and explicitly graphic description to implant her thoughts and fears from childhood atrocities that she experienced. I have shown how the first few sentences of the book foreshadow an underlying theme throughout the entire book. Karr is undisputedly a master at implanting these themes within The Liar’s Club in order to foreshadow events that shaped her writing and her thoughts, but along with the foreshadowing she uses description to immerse the reader in the moment. Be it happy, sad, or quite frankly, disturbing, Karr unarguably has and many traumatic experiences that have shaped who she is and how she portrays that in her writings today.