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Mary Karr opens her memoir with a memory she admits is incomplete - a family doctor asking a seven-year-old to show him the marks, a sheriff holding her sister - and the rest of the book is, in a sense, a long excavation of what surrounds that fractured image. Published in 1995, The Liars' Club recounts Karr's childhood in the 1960s in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas, a place she renames Leechfield, all oil refineries, chemical plants and swampy heat. The title refers to her father and his drinking buddies, who gathered to swap stories when they were not working at the refinery, and the inheritance is plain on every page: Karr got her Daddy's gift for the tall tale and turned it on her own family.

What a family it is. A painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip into psychosis; a fist-swinging father; squandered inheritances, emptied bottles, and guns leveled at the deserving and undeserving alike. The raw material is grim - rape at eight, a mother burning her children's belongings in the yard, the slow-motion wreck of two marriages to the same man - and yet the book's most disorienting quality is how funny it is. Karr understands the inherent power in the fine line between comedy and tragedy, and she handles such juxtapositions like a knife thrower with something to prove: a wickedly funny account of smart-alecky goofing off can suddenly bolt into a horrific remembrance of sexual abuse. The whiplash is the method. You laugh, then feel implicated in having laughed, then realize that this is precisely how a child survives a household like this one - by treating catastrophe as just another story to be told well.

The telling is the thing. Karr was an award-winning poet before she was a memoirist, and the sentences show it. Her language is her most powerful tool, wielded with the virtuosity of both a lyric poet and an earthy, down-home Texan, and she borrows her father's deadpan delivery for transitions that land like punchlines: "Maybe if Mother hadn't taken it in her head to shoot Hector, we'd never have got back to Texas." The prose is so seductive that the dysfunction sneaks up on you; the writing is beautiful enough that you hardly register how dark the material is until you surface from the book and look around your own life. That seduction is also, arguably, the book's sleight of hand. The revelations continue to the final page, with a misleading carelessness as seductive as any world-class liar's - and given the title, the question of how much to believe hovers over everything. Karr is upfront about memory's unreliability, which buys her a lot of latitude, though some episodes are rendered in a cinematic detail no adult could plausibly recall from age seven. The honest response is that it scarcely matters: this is a captivating book whether or not you believe every word of it.

It is not flawless. The structure sags in its final third, when the narrative jumps forward to Karr at twenty-five, returning home after her father's stroke. Her mother's long-withheld revelation explains a great deal, but the section reads like an afterthought tacked on to give meaning to the events of the childhood; by stepping out of the child experiencing events into the adult trying to understand them, Karr weakens the impact of the narrative. There are also threads that simply evaporate - an early gesture toward underpinning the story with the unfolding atrocity of Vietnam is ultimately dropped - and certain gaps in the abuse scenes go unexamined in ways that can frustrate as much as they unsettle. And the relentlessness wears: this is a hard read, and some stretches of Grandma Moore's reign of terror feel like endurance rather than illumination.

Still, the book's stature has only grown in the three decades since publication, and deservedly so. It has been named among the greatest memoirs of the past half-century and called one of the best books ever written about growing up in America, and it effectively relaunched the modern memoir as a serious literary form - for better and, given its lesser imitators, sometimes for worse. What separates it from the misery-lit flood it inadvertently unleashed is the total absence of self-pity. Karr shows us a terrific family of liars and drunks, redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth, and she does it without asking to be admired for her survival. The Liars' Club is what happens when a poet's precision meets a barstool raconteur's timing in one of the roughest corners of America. Nearly everything written about a hard childhood since owes it a debt, and almost none of it has paid the debt back with interest.