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Not long before my mother died, the tile guy redoing her kitchen pried from the wall a tile with an unlikely round hole in it. He sat back on his knees and held it up so the sun through aged yellow curtains seemed to pierce the hole like a laser. He winked at my sister Lecia and me before turning to my gray-haired mother, now bent over her copy of “Marcus Aurelius” and a bowl of sinus-opening chili, and quipped, “Now Miss Karr, this looks like a bullet hole.”

Lecia didn’t miss a beat, saying, “Mother, isn’t that where you shot at daddy?”

And Mother squinted up, slid her glasses down her patrician-looking nose and said, very blase, “No that’s where I shot at Larry.” She wheeled to point at another wall, adding, “Over there’s where I shot at your daddy.”

Which tells you why I chose to write “The Liars’ Club” as memoir instead of fiction: When fortune hands you such characters, why bother to make stuff up? It also clues you in to Mother’s outlaw nature, and the degree to which -- being long sober before she died -- she’d accepted the jackpots of her past without much shame.

I’d forewarned Mother and Lecia about the events I planned to parade down the page, and from the git-go Mother said, “Hell, get it off your chest.... If I gave a damn what anybody thought, I’d have been baking cookies and going to PTA.” Lecia -- a more circumspect spirit -- also cheered me on. I needed money for a car desperately (being a single mom in Syracuse, N.Y., where bus service is spare and snowfall measurable in yards). Needing money is a supremely noble cause among our ilk, but Lecia would have backed any project I’d taken on. (“Going on a murder spree? Good. Lotta yahoos need killing.”)

The surprise bonus came after “Liars’ Club” (and later, its sister “Cherry”) became public: As taboos on subjects vaporized in my family, the level of candor in my clan got jacked way up. There was no need to scudge anymore about Mother’s past propensity to get drunk and openly wag firearms, or the number of times she’d married (seven -- twice to my Texas oil-worker daddy).

As certain facts that had once scalded our insides got broadcast, we got oddly used to them. Call it aversion therapy, but the events seeped in a little deeper. We healed more, though that had never been the point. Our distant catastrophes became somehow manageable. Catharsis, the Greeks call it.

To wit: A chirpy morning talk-show host in Houston, where my circumspect Republican sister had a massive insurance business, once turned to me on camera and said, “What is it like to have your mother try to kill you with a butcher knife?” The smile might have stayed forever shining from her lipsticked mouth as she waited for me to concoct an answer had not my sister -- sitting just off the set -- shouted, “It’s a big old [expletive] bummer.” So I broke up, then the camera guys bent over double, and the whole taping had to start over.

There was an awful burden strapped to Lecia’s back from grade school onward as she schemed to prevent our combustible mother from completely flaming out. About age 11, Lecia had not only figured out a stick shift, she could talk the average highway patrolman out of giving her a ticket by arguing she’d left her license at home: “Officer, sir, I’m rushing my baby sister home to our momma cause her fever’s just scorching my hand, poor little dumpling.” My job was usually looking doleful.

Such stories have ceased to be my business, since I’m no longer the person who wrote “Liars’ Club.” To promote a book so long after it’s in print makes you -- according to novelist Ian McEwan -- an employee of your former self. I haven’t really read the book since 1995.

I do, however, continue to receive from it the shiniest of gems: readers who get it. As I’m signing books after a lecture, somebody always stays till the end to pull me aside, and while the auditorium is being swept out around us, I hear a stranger’s unlikely family saga. People think I’ll empathize, and it’s not hyperbolic to claim I always do.

But I’d set out on the road fearing my much-loved family would wind up warped by public judgment into gargoyles, myself painted as some poor thing. My friend Geoffrey Wolff, whose memoir “The Duke of Deception” was one of the first I truly admired, once confessed how awful he felt discussing family mishaps while being interviewed: “You put the people you love most in the world into a narrative, then you lose control of the narrative.”

The opposite happened with me. Bookstores across the country seemed populated by like-minded souls who may not have endured the vodka-sodden nights and the firearms, but shared the internal world of a kid feeling the foundations of a family shake. In one woman’s glossy ‘50s household, her country-club mother had an affair with her son’s best friend. Somehow, the family got through it.

The stories spilled out, and after days on the road prattling to journalists, the greatest balm was simply to listen -- after the reading and before the bookstore closed -- to other people’s family sagas.

Sometimes only one person would linger late. In other places five or six might wind up standing with me in the parking lot. It was summer. I always had an early flight the next morning, but the talks felt like some tribal campfire. Percy Shelley wrote in “A Defense of Poetry” that reading should humanize us, and that’s what talking to the readers did for me.

After a while, I tried to extend the talks into my days with media people. It was a game I played during the day, seeing how much I could get journalists to talk about their own childhoods. A question a reporter aimed at me about my family would get flipped around. “Was your mother anything like that?” I’d say, and the conversation would often deepen.

According to other writers in my own informal poll, “Liars’ Club” -- and “Cherry” -- are odd not so much in the boatload of mail they generated (the bestseller’s blessing/curse) but in the length and intensity of those letters. At the peak of the first book’s selling cycle, when it hovered at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list for months (no, it never made No. 1), I got 400 to 500 letters a week, now dwindled to between 20 and 60 per year. How many of those letters began, “I’ve never told anybody this, but.... “? I didn’t count. A bunch.

OK, there were a lot of felons who would let me ghostwrite their story of unjust incarceration while they held out the possible bonus of conjugal visits. But most letters came from average people pouring out tales of their kin in lengthy missives. I got other folks’ school photos and news clippings and death announcements, even (in one case) a Xeroxed order of protection. Many psychiatrists wrote to claim they’d given my book to clients and found it useful for therapy about childhood sexual abuse, alcoholism and trauma.

Reading “Liars’ Club” seemed to crowbar open something in people. “Your book just dredged up so many memories....” Or, “After reading ‘Liars’ Club,’ my brother and I have reconciled....” Or, “I’ve been writing down some of what we went through when my father came back from Vietnam....” Or, “I never knew how my mother’s cancer death has kept rotting inside me....”

This is a writer’s dream response, what I’d hankered for as a kid setting crayon to cardboard on Mother’s Day -- to plug a reader into some wall outlet deep in the personal psychic machine that might jump-start him or her into a more feeling way of life.

Recently, in a Midtown deli in Manhattan, I got blindsided by what we in my family call a “Liars’ Club” moment. I’d gone to grab a bite with some new acquaintances after yoga class when the subject of memoir cropped up. One woman stopped using the mustard knife mid-smear and turned to me all keyed up. “You should read “The Liars’ Club” by Mary Karr.” She was a big-deal Broadway actress, and her face had all the zeal of an infomercial maestro.

I said, “I am Mary Karr.”

At which point she burst into tears. “Your book changed my life,” she said.

Maybe this sounds like a lot of bragging and big talk, but it’s a common enough phenomenon to warrant mention. So many readers have started crying when they meet me that I used to bring a box of tissues to book signings. I even cooked up a tension-breaking joke about being such a disappointment in person. And when somebody said (as this woman did) that her psychiatrist had given her the book, I suggested she sue for malpractice. On the way out of the restaurant, the actress slipped me her card. “I have a lot of stories to tell you,” she said.

Her stories will no doubt reconfirm the only sliver of irrefutable wisdom on the subject of kin this odyssey has taught me: A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

If “The Liars’ Club” began as a love letter to my less-than-perfect clan, its publication constructed for me -- in midlife -- what I’d hankered so desperately for as a dreamy kid comforted only by reading: that mythic village of like-minded souls who bloom by sharing old tales -- the kind that fire you up and set you loose, the true kind.