Cherry: A Memoir - Softcover

Karr, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141002077 ISBN 13: 9780141002071

Publisher: Penguin, 2001

Synopsis

From Mary Karr comes this gorgeously written, often hilarious story of her tumultuous teens and sexual coming-of-age. Picking up where the bestselling The Liars' Club left off, Karr dashes down the trail of her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom. Fleeing the thrills and terrors of adolescence, she clashes against authority in all its forms and hooks up with an unforgettable band of heads and bona-fide geniuses. Parts of Cherry will leave you gasping with laughter. Karr assembles a self from the smokiest beginnings, delivering a long-awaited sequel that is both "bawdy and wise" (San Francisco Chronicle).

About this title

Review:

The second of Mary Karr's memoirs, Cherry, slips seamlessly into the rhythm and distinctive style of the first. As a girl idling her way through long, toxically boring summer afternoons in Leechfield, Texas, Karr dreamed up an unusual career for herself; "to write one-half poetry and one-half autobiography". She has since done both, and even when she's recounting a dirty joke, she can't help but employ a poet's precise and musical vision. Her first memoir, The Liar's Club, was as searing a chronicle of family life as can be imagined--tough, funny, and crackling with sorrow and wit. Against all odds, its sequel doesn't disappoint. Cherry finds the teenage Mary still marooned in a family whose behaviour ranges from charmingly eccentric to dangerously crazy. (This, for instance, is the Karr version of a note from home: "Lecia Karr's leprosy kicked in, and I had to wrap her limbs in balm and hyssop. Please excuse her".) But here the focus has shifted to Mary herself, furiously engaged in irritating authority at every turn: flouting the dress code, dropping acid, running from the police, falling in love.

First love, you might say, heart sinking in chest: what more can possibly be said about such a subject? Actually, a great deal. To read Cherry is to realise how rare it is to find a teenage girl portrayed on her own terms. As a chronicle of female adolescence with all its longings, fantasies, cruelties and fears, Karr's memoir goes darker and deeper than any book in which the protagonist doesn't end up dead. She turns a savage eye on her own hypocrisies and failings and we like her all the more for them. We even end up fond of Leechfield, easily the toughest, smelliest, nastiest little place ever to appear between the covers of a book--"a town too ugly not to love," her father called it in The Liar's Club. Growing up in such a place is necessarily about getting the hell out but it's also about inventing a new identity with which to make your escape. That's the blessing Karr's wise friend Meredith bestows after a particularly harrowing (and harrowingly funny) acid trip: "I see big adventures for Mary. Big adventures, long roads, great oceans: same self." Cherry is the story of how Karr begins to acquire that self, however fumblingly--a big adventure for Mary, as it is for all of us, and one we never finish as long as we live. Perhaps that's the book's greatest pleasure of all: it hints there's more to come. --Mary Park

Review:

"Karr captures, exactly, what it's like for a girl to kiss the first boy she loves....She captures, exactly, what it's like to start high school....She captures, exactly, what it's like to be a book-hungry teenager, enraptured by the words and heady ideas that offer transport from the banalities of small-town life....As she did in The Liars' Club, Ms. Karr combines a poet's lyricism and a Texan's down-home vernacular with her natural storytelling gift." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A compelling ride through [Karr's] adolescence....What distinguishes Karr is the ability to serve up her experiences in a way that packs the wallop of immediacy with the salty tang of adult reflection...her descriptions of the bruised-lip, druggy wonder of teenage love are precise, unsentimental, and lovely." --Chicago Tribune

"The Liars' Club left no doubt that Mary Karr could flat out write...the one question everyone had upon finishing her story was, could she do it again? Cherry lays that question to rest once and for all....It never lacks for those trademark Karr details, but it's about all of us. --Newsweek

"A smart, searing memoir....Romance, in all of its wondrous and heartbreaking incarnations, is Karr's great subterranean subject, the ground upon which her wily, whip-smart writing catches root." --Lisa Shea, Elle

Stunning...If The Liars' Club succeeded partly because of its riveting particularity, Cherry succeeds because of its universality. The first book is about one harrowing childhood, the second about every adolescence. She can turn even the most mundane events into gorgeous prose." --The New York Times Book Review

"Cherry is the kind of book a brave parent could do a lot worse than to give to a teenager....Teenage girls might come away from it knowing that they're not freaks, that mistakes aren't fatal, and that good writing kisses just about everything better. And for teenage boys, reading Cherry would be like stealing the other team's playbook....Mary Karr gives memoir back its good name." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Here, intact, is the smart, sassy, wickedly observant voice first met in The Liars' Club, a voice that knows how to tell a story in a crackling vernacular that feels exactly true to its setting." --The Washington Post

"Cherry delivers. Karr still has her delicious knack for making you guffaw through horrible events...its humor, warmth, and crackling language should keep Karr's fans hungering for another round." --People Magazine

"Karr writes about adolescence with the same emotional precision that illuminated her account of childhood...[she] nails with wonderful specificity the complex way adolescents bond intellectually and emotionally. Her descriptions of her early sexual experiences are also original. Her language is frank without becoming clinical, and she captures the swooning tenderness of a kiss without sounding sentimental...firmly rooted though it is in a particular time and place, Cherry, like all serious autobiographies, is about something much more universal: the construction of a satisfying identity or, more precisely, the discovery of a fundamental self that was there all along." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"It's the powerful spiked punch of Karr's writing that amazes...Cherry is about the dizzy funk of female teen sexuality, and Karr captures the innocence and dirt of it, the hunger and the thrill, with exquisite pitch. Karr's connection to her younger sexual self is profound with mercy or nostalgia....Karr identifies the vulnerable, frightening gap between most girls' night thoughts and those in the day....Right now, in this remembrance of blooming, Karr continues to set the literary standard for making the personal universal." --Entertainment Weekly

"This book is best when it portrays things common to all of us in adolescence. The woeful sense of isolation. The fierce desire to have friends. The agitated, wondrous discovery of things sexual. Those awkward kisses in the dark. And the risks." --USA Today

"This book is about being a female adolescent, a horrible fate; the best that can be said of it is that one does recover. The extraordinary thing about Karr, in addition to the poetry of her writing, is her stunning honesty." --Molly Ivins, Ft. Worth Star-Telegram

"Awesomely written...Cherry is beautifully wrought and tart in its angst-wrangling....Karr can render sentences so powerful as to make you bow your head in reverence." --The Village Voice

"Cherry is beautifully written, without a single word wasted. Karr's poetic yet tensile language creates exceptional landscapes, both physical and emotional...her broad but precise descriptions, coupled with piercing insights into the sometimes agonizing trials of growing up, create fully realized characters with whom the reader can immediately empathize....Hardly a soul alive hasn't felt exiled in the dark territory of adolescence; Karr maps this landscape expertly and candidly." --The San Diego Union

"Step aside, J. D. Salinger, and take your alter ego Holden Caulfield with you. Mary Karr has staked out your turf, the upended land of adolescence. And she is just smart, angry, sensitive and self-mocking enough to defend it with everything she's got...this time Karr has created another fiercely poetic and alternately bruising, comic, and picaresque account of her wild and painful journey through early adolescence. And if ever the tortuous metamorphosis from caterpillar to damaged butterfly has been captured in print, this is it...the tales of her first serious crush, first kiss and first date [are] each gorgeously delineated in all their tragicomic dimensions, and unique in the way they capture the overwhelming combination of attraction and repulsion involved in early sexual experiences. But everything Karr touches is emblazoned with this raw honesty and a sense of the breathtaking confusion and emotional terrorism of adolescenc

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0141002077
• ISBN 13: 9780141002071
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288