Cherry: A Memoir

That summer I fell into reading as into a deep well where no voice could reach me. There was a poem about a goat-footed balloon man I recited everyday like a spell, and another about somebody stealing somebody else's plums and saying he was sorry but not really meaning it. I read the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and fancied myself running away to Africa to find just such an ape man to swing me from vine to vine.

Mary Karr is best known for her memoir of a childhood spent in a rough and tumble Texas town. This is her follow up to that memoir, taking the reader through her teenage years. At the start of the story, Mary is a bookish girl in a place that did not value intelligence, and especially not in women. She eventually makes show more friends and then discovers both boys and drugs. It was the seventies and she quickly fell in with a group of surfer boys and their hangers-on, which suited her contrarian nature and need to push back against the often pointless authoritarianism of her high school. Her parents are not able to provide a good example or even rules, although they do occasionally come through when needed.

So you ride home strangely placated. You lack the wits to acknowledge the jail cell of the previous night. If you'd glanced back even once, given that arrest one hard look, a lot of onrushing trouble might have been staved off. show less

Mary Karr's second midlife memoir covers the years she spent as a teenager in a deary Texas refinery town and details her misadventures with drugs, sex, and the local hippie subculture. Karr's experiences aren't exactly unique, but she's still unflinchingly honest about her wildly dysfunctional family and is in a good position to witness a much-discussed generational shift. "Cherry" perfectly captures the moment when American youth culture tilted into drug-fueled hippie abandon. The prose in "Cherry" is, if anything, even better than the writing in "The Liars Club," and that's no mean feat. Karr gracefully and effortlessly imbues real-life events with novelistic significance, combining a reporter's commitment to detail with a novelist's show more interest in character. She's even good with topics that most writers misjudge badly: the psychedelic experience and the tricky terrain of female desire.

The problems with "Cherry" might, sadly enough, originate in the book's subject. Karr was, by her own admission, a rather melodramatic and self-centered teen, and spending almost three hundred pages with the adolescent version of the author can grow tiresome. As her drug use grows more extreme towards the end of the book, you can sense a real psychic chasm open beneath her and I'm not sure that it gets fully resolved by the book's end. Like "The Bell Jar," "Cherry" is suffused with a sense of dread and confusion so strong that it might be contagious. One gets the sense that Karr's extremely lucky to be both alive and sane. She's a good writer, though, and, despite its problems, I'm glad that she lived long enough to produce this book. show less

Re-read in preparation for the upcoming release of LIT.

This second in Karr's series of memoirs covers her teen years in Texas, during which she wanders around stoned and poetical. She's about 10 years older than I am, and there is a lot of overlap in our respective memories. Her voice is pure and overcomes the at times awkward choice of second person narration. I do not become quite as immersed in this as I do in her earlier book, but I enjoy it mightily.

As my first trip into Mary Carr's world, I was entranced and inspired. I can't wait to write my own memoir!

Her prose was loaded and lush with wonderful metaphors and invoked her feelings, especially during that one chapter at Effie's. I was tripped the hell out!

She did lose me during the acid trip chapters but the first two thirds of the book had me hooked.

She's a great writer; I can't front. I only hope to be as awesome as she is.

I'm reading this now (just finished it). It's wonderful! Straight talk from an attractive and exasperating young woman-- the cultural references are spot on. Her memories of the trials-- the ones she experienced, and the ones she caused-- and cluelessness of adolescence are bravely and truthfully presented. Mary Karr is a delight to read.

Though it pales in comparison with Karr's earlier memoir (Liar's Club), still a great read. She really captures the remembered voice of an imaginative girl at various ages. I confess, though, that after setting the book aside for a week 95% of the way through it, I had to force myself through the rest of it.

Mary Karr has great subtle humor and her story of her life from pre-junior high to college age is sad, funny, and hopeful. Towards the end she gets a bit long-winded with her acid trips and stoner beach stories, but it's a valid thread of thought and memory that leads to the end of the book. I think Mary Karr is a very prosaic and funny author. Can't wait to read more of her work.