"Astonishing...one of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Mary Karr's God-awful childhood has a calamitous appeal...the choice in the book is between howling misery and howling laughter, and the reader veers toward laughter. Karr has survived to write a drop-dead reply to the question, 'Ma, what was it like when you were a little girl?'" -Time "This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a back-up opinion...it's like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poet's precision of language and a poet's instinct into people applied to one of the roughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing event." -Molly Ivins, The Nation "Elegiac and searching...her toughness of spirit, her poetry, her language, her very voice are the agents of rebirth on this difficult, hard-earned journey." -New York Times Book Review "Bold, blunt, and cinematic...nothing short of superb." -Entertainment Weekly "Overflows with sparkling wit and humor...Truth beats powerfully at the heart of this dazzling memoir." -San Francisco Chronicle "Karr lovingly retells her parents' best lies and drunken extravagances with an ear for bar-stool phraseology and a winking eye for image. The revelations continue to the final page, with a misleading carelessness as seductive as any world-class liar's." -The New Yorker