In Chapter 15 of The Liars’ Club, Karr comes upon her grandmother’s prosthetic leg while searching through her family’s attic for something else. Although she is now a grown woman, and her grandmother is long gone, the sight of the leg still startles and frightens her, almost as if it were an actual, cut-off limb. She is so flustered that she drops the trunk in which the leg is lying: “Maybe a coiled rattler weaving its head and shaking out a rasp would’ve panicked me more, but I doubt it” (312). Karr’s panicked reaction has its roots in her family history.

The leg is a symbol of her grandmother’s lengthy illness, which kept her in the Karr family house; at the same time, it is also a symbol of her grandmother’s uncanny potency and staying power. Karr remembers her grandmother’s ferocity as only increasing with each successive phase of her cancer, as if her illness gave her strength rather than diminished her. Her grandmother was able to transform many of the trappings of her illness, moreover, into instruments of terror and intimidation. For instance, her wheelchair allowed her to move soundlessly through the house, and therefore to sneak up on Karr and her sister: “She had a habit of sneaking up on Lecia and me and shouting Aha! as if she’d discovered us shooting up heroin with a turkey baster or eviscerating some small animal” (61).