Mary Karr is the author and the main character of this book. Throughout the memoir, the stories relate her mainly as a child, other than in the final two chapters, in which she appears as a grown woman visiting home. Her adult memoirist self frequently interrupts the flow of her own story, most often to admit to a lapse in memory or to a deliberate withholding of information; the effect is both authoritative and diffident, an adult stepping in only to voice her uncertainty. This effect is of course by design—even if it seems not to be—and gives the impression of someone who is wrestling with difficult material, that of her own life.

Both the adult and the child Karr come across as equally vulnerable and scrappy as well as introverted and extroverted. The child Karr, while quick to get into fights and to join in with her father’s outdoorsy manly rituals, also comes across as in some ways softer and gentler than her older sister, Lecia. She lacks her sister’s competence and practicality and is more so dreamy and bookish; she also—as the very writing of this memoir demonstrates—has a need to make sense of her family, rather than to simply cope with them, as Lecia does.