Customer Reviews

Cherry

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

Mary Karr is a fine writer. When I read her memoir, "The Liar's
Club" about her rough and tumble childhood in a working class
Texas town, I loved every word. That's why I was so anxious to read
this sequel, which deals with her adolescence. There are definitely
some differences between the two books, but I wasn't
disappointed.

The voice of the young Mary Karr comes through loud
and clear. It's honest and foul-mouthed and disrespectful. It's a
sharp-tongued blade that dares to illuminate the angst of adolescence
with a hard-edged sense of humor. And yet it brings the bittersweet
sadness of disappointments and awakenings to the page. The reader
cannot help but love her.

This book tells her story from age 11
through 17. It's about her friendships and boyfriends and coming of
age. As it takes place in the 1970s, there are a lot of drugs. Mary
is sent to the principal's office for not wearing a bra. Mary hangs
out with long-haired surfers and does drugs. Mary gets arrested.
Mary's sister takes a different path than Mary.

In this book, Mary's
parents take a back seat to the peer group. The story of their
tumultuous marriage, psychological breakdowns and heavy drinking has
been explored in "The Liar's Club". By this book their
eccentricities and foibles are already accepted as givens. Again,
their love shines through.

I'm glad that Ms. Karr decided to
continue her story. It might have been a little more episodic than
the first book and the events not as traumatic. But the strength of
her writing is not in the events, but in her view of them. And that
is why I enjoyed this book so much.

The book ends when Mary is 17.
Hopefully, they'll be yet another book that will follow her through
the years.

"The Liars' Club" is such a beautiful, touching, and profound memoir that it takes your breath away. Clearly, such a work is a hard "act" to follow. Unfortunately, this has been represented as a sequel to "The Liars' Club" setting the expectations bar very high. While this book is ok, it comes as a disappointment in light of the expectations that have been established by the hype.

First, it is important to note that this really isn't a sequel. "The Liars' Club" was a poignant description of her parents tumultuous marriage as viewed through the eyes of a child, and a heart wrenching tribute to her father. Her parents are decidedly in the background in "Cherry" with her father being no more than a footnote. However, Karr's mother plays a sympathetic supporting role as a farsighted, sensitive and progressive, albeit eccentric, mother for an adolescent girl.

Unlike her former memoir, "Cherry" is primarily about Mary Karr and about her angst as a teenager and her distinctive transformation as an adolescent in light of a highly untraditional and unorthodox upbringing in a decidedly traditional blue collar town. I found Karr's depiction of the town's relative tolerance of individual idiosyncracies particularly gratifying in light of the erroneous stereotypes often attributed to working class communities and Texas as a whole.

Karr offers important, albeit subtle, socioeconomic observations on the disenfranchisement of the working class, particularly in light of the disillusionment and subsequent changes in social mores which arose during the Vietnam War era (though those social structures were more important to the middle class as Karr's representation of the working class suggests). However, some of the recollections seemed disjointed, or out of focus, perhaps intentionally in her depiction of the search for purpose in an often drug induced haze.

I think the reaction to this book will definitely be mixed. It would probably have been better received if it preceded "The Liars' Club" or if the reader didn't know they were written by the same author.

First of all, let me echo other reviewers in saying not to expect anything like The Liar's Club. Mary Karr is still an enormously gifted writer, but while The Liar's Club had it moments of joy interspersed with various traumas, Cherry is just plain dank. Mary's exploits as a child weren't hopeless -- she had a resiliancy about her that assured the reader that she'd be all right, or some version thereof, in the end. The adolescent Mary descends deeper and deeper into a darkness that she manufactures for herself with the help of a pharmacy's worth of drugs and a heapin' helping of teen angst thrown in for good measure. I found it extremely interesting that Karr resorted to telling her story in second person in the last part, in which her relationship with drugs begins. I wondered to myself as I was reading whether she was using the second person narrative as a way of distancing herself from her high school self. In any case, the book is a much more difficult read than The Liar's Club, and I would definitely recommend that book before dipping your toes into this one. The reader emerges thoroughly saddened by Karr's own outright and between-the-lines admissions of her mistakes. I found her relationships with people especially dismaying -- but perhaps that was simply the way she chose to tell the story. The adolescent Karr is far from the precocious child of The Liar's Club. Her story is told from the bottom of an abyss -- I read an interview with Karr where she said that while writing Cherry, she would write for an hour and a half and then just collapse on the floor and fall asleep from exhaustion. I don't doubt it. A difficult yet rewarding book.

Mary, like most of us, was more endearing as a tough, tenacious little girl in "Liar's Club" than an out-of-control teenager. Some reviewers seem upset with the book exactly as they would a child who changed from attractive and lively into teenage angst before their eyes.

There is more evidence of Mary Karr the poet in this book. She is not chronicling so much as experiencing. Her kindness and tenderness toward the boys who touched her life is a fine strength in "Cherry." Rarely have I come across such lyricism in describing the beauty of a young male.

"His surfer cut hung in a bright wing across his forehead. He stood stock still in his pedals for the entire strip of road past my house like the figurehead on a ship's prow, and his thoughtless beauty dragged from me the faint tug of something like desire. His body was thin-muscled as a greyhound's. Maybe his hurtling motion made enough wind to cool him off, but he didn't look to suffer from the heat I felt so squandered in."

I winced with Mary when she looked back with pain at her own self-centeredness, her dismissal and uncaringness for anyone's pain but her own. Her descriptions of life as lived and hopefully survived in High School USA are right on the money. She had a fierce independence that most teens lack, but she certainly did wallow in her rebellion.

The last quarter of the book was self-indulgence, I know no other way to describe it. Ms. Karr distances herself by abandoning the first person "I" to the second person "you" for her drug induced psychedelic outing. It went on too long. Weird tripping is only fascinating to the tripper; it was like having someone go on and on about their strange dream last night. I felt as if I had been dropped into a bad David Lynch movie. This segment spoiled my enjoyment of an otherwise fine book.

I look forward to Mary Karr's next outing and recommend "Cherry" for anyone who doesn't mind taking a wild ride through the early `70s.

What does Mary Karr have left to prove? She already wrote the definitive memoir of a child's life in an East Texas hellhole, "The Liars' Club," which as a first-person narrative remains better than anything I've ever come across. Why risk another trip to the well? Can you exceed expectations when so many of them, like mine, are off the charts?

I'm in a funny position writing this, because I expected to come here and write about my disappointment with "Cherry," why it wasn't up to par with "Liars' Club." But reading all the one- and two-star reviews, some of which raise valid points, others of which are just all wet, I feel a little more protective about what I just read.

No, it's not as involving as "Liars' Club." Karr isn't the passive youngster anymore, and she takes on a wider swath of her life, from just before sixth grade all the way up through high school, meaning there isn't the concentration of time that worked with "Liars' Club." Our narrator is changing this time, and quickly.

More problematic, there is Karr's use of the second-person singular for the bulk of the book, describing her actions as if you are her. It doesn't work, feeling arch and odd instead of inclusive. Karr's budding sensibilities as a poet also come into play, with the help of a friend suspiciously named Meredith Bright, and you either will identify with their precocious conversations on absurdist theater or, like me, feel distanced by it. But it's her life, and she should tell it as it is.

The best part of the book is its first third, with its account of elementary and junior high school life. Karr's sharp eye for detail and her fluidity with language, so stunning in "Liars' Club," doesn't fail her here. She recalls the posture of a picked-on classmate "till her whole body became a sort of living question mark, the punctuation with which she responded to every mean sentence we could construct." Then there's her fear when approached by a boy she likes: "Part of me is also crazily rewinding to play back my whole walk across the field, for surely I did some stupid thing. I wouldn't pick my nose or anything...but I could have been skipping or singing some goofy song under my breath."

Later, she will find herself recruited to give this same boy a long leg massage, in a riotously funny passage in which she gets hot and bothered learning the critical distinction between gastrocs and hamstrings.

While people here note the presence of drugs, in all fairness they don't show up for more than a hundred pages, and she doesn't exactly turn into Ozzy Osbourne. She smokes some joints, and tries a few other things, but seems a bit removed from the drug culture even as she writes about it. Actually, I was glad to have the drugs come into play, as it beat reading about her reading Howard Nemerov. She has sex, too, but is shier about describing that than I would have expected from "Liars' Club."

Karr is a virtuoso at description, and tying up the loose ends of a disorderly life. She makes for exciting, vivid company. If you liked reading Stephen King's "The Body," or Russell Baker's "Growing Up," you will like "Cherry." Even if you didn't like "The Body" or "Growing Up," you will like "Cherry."

But you will like "Liars' Club" so much more.

Unbelievable pain scalds almost every sentence of this powerful autobiography of growing up an intelligent outsider in a small Texas town (Leechfield -- "mind-crushing atmosphere of sameness"). You will find yourself stunned by the challenging circumstances of Professor Karr's teenage years, and rooting for her to find her grounding.

The superb writing would be enough to attract any reader, even though it features a frankness and roughness of tone that I normally condemn. In this case, the language is warranted in portraying the emotional reality of Professor Karr's life. It gives you access to her mostly uncensored thinking in a way that captures the moment for all time. For example, in describing her forthcoming trip to California she says, "[Y]ou are still immortal, and that coast . . . is beckoning you with invisible fingers of hashish smoke."

Ms. Karr managed to be an outsider in more ways that most can imagine. She was an intelligent female in a town that did not favor intelligence. Her family was about as unconventional as you can imagine ("Mother also had a secret history of hasty marriages and equally hasty dissolutions." -- 7 marriages in all, including two to Ms. Karr's daddy; her daddy drank and kept a mistress who was later shot and killed by her husband.). She was an unattractive tomboy who had a strong sexual drive from a young age. She frequently misbehaved in ways that caused people to become very uncomfortable (such as abusing people verbally in explicitly profane ways, riding topless on her bicycle when she was 11, and going noticeably braless in high school).

As a result, she had a hard time making and keeping friends. "Other girls from families as weird as mine managed to overcome their origins . . . . Without the company of other girls, the summer became the first of many vacant summers."

Her mother and daddy had a habit of just disappearing at night to show up days later with various lame excuses. She and her sister would steal her daddy's truck at 13 and drive around looking for one or both of their parents.

As a result, "I was growing into a worrier, a world-class insomniac, what one friend would later describe as a grief-seeking missile."

Not surprisingly, she was soon experimenting with almost every sort of drug and way of partying that you can imagine . . . looking to dull or avoid the pain. These experiences and their consequences are described in compelling detail in the book.

Not too many people cut her any slack, and she was always surprised when someone tried to help her.

Between the vividness of her experiences and the beauty of the writing, this book is likely to become a classic among young people, especially young women, and those who want to understand them better.

After reading the book, I gave my teenage daughter a big hug and thanked our lucky stars that she is having an easier time than Professor Karr did.

After you finish this book, consider how you can create more stability and kindness for someone in your family who really needs them.

Be there.

Picks up where The Liar's Club left off. Exquisite writing about Mary Karr's volatile, on-the-edge adolescence in a nowhere little town in Texas. Anyone who thinks kids in a small town can't get up to 'mischief' would do well to read Cherry. Karr is talented, brilliant, and challenged by her situation: the child of unreliable, often absent parents who blunder through life as if parenting were a game you can choose to play - or not.
As a writer myself, I found Karr's use of the second person 'you' when referring to herself to be a stunningly successful ploy, a way of showing how adolescents distant themselves from their own lives even in speech and writing. Maturing out of childhood and directly into sexuality, Karr finds her salvation in books and language, but it obviously wasn't easy.
Wonderful writing, scary story, great book.

Both the cover and title of Mary Karr's second memoir, "Cherry," are deceptive. Although her scathingly witty and powerfully realized descriptions of coming-of-age in the environmentally and spiritually polluted town of Leechfield, Texas, during the late 1960s and early 70s treat her sexual awakening, her memoir is much more a sarcastic, self-deprecating, but liberating analysis of how Mary came to understand her essence. Her knowledge of what she would come to refer to as her "Same Self" is hard earned, the author having travelled through the seas of family dysfunction, alienation and rejection of her social mileu, and a bizarre and frightening absorbtion into the drug-culture and the nascent counterculture of her adolescence. Ms. Karr is an exquisite writer; the compelling narrative of her life augments the marvelous capturing of Texan patois and the absolutely captivating characterizations she renders of the men, women and children who help provide defintion to her life.

Now a professor of English at Syracuse University, Mary Karr was a hellion as a child and a rebel as a teenager. Resentful of the restrictions imposed upon her by a town dedicated to spewing toxic waste into the atmosphere and reared by an alcoholic father and a desperately brilliant but fiercely independent mother, Mary determines not to follow the footsteps of her voluptuous (and right wing) older sister. At eleven, envious of her boyfriends' freedom and captivated by her initial sexual stirrings towards one of them, Mary determines to ride her bike bare-chested. This foray into inarticulated feminist rebellion backfires, of course; the humiliated Mary retreats into her home, bewildered by her mother's bland acquiesence and determined even more to find her place in the world. Her eventual understanding of her place as a woman -- of its power, its fragility and its vulnerability -- evolves in a powerful and frightening description of an aborted sexual assualt on her mother.

That place would not be in school. Some of the memoir's best writing captures the tumultuous years Mary survived high school. A self-described screw-up, Mary constantly challenged authorities, ridiculing their perceived stupidity and rigidity, wantonly defying traditional convention and eagerly embracing a personality which glorified lassitude, disenchantment and disengagement. Her eventual involvement (perhaps devolution into) with the world of drugs causes her to remember many events in a fragmented, near kaleidescopic manner. Although a bit repetitious at times, her colorful, caustic and critical analaysis of the impact of drugs on her consciousness remind the reader of how much this young woman actually forced upon herself in her quest for self understanding.

The brutal truth is that Mary Karr was lucky to escape Leechfield. "The slope of boredom there is steep enough to cast the shadow of an astonishingly high suicide rate." Despite the "crushing tedium" of life, this profoundly brilliant, angry, ironic and self-deprecating poet found not only courage, but voice. It is this unbridled tension and strength that gives "Cherry" its power. Its author is neither seeking approval nor indictment; she is merely attempting to demonstrate that the explosive impact of her environment did not destroy her. Indeed, it is that defiant, open-faced grit that gives "Cherry" its capacity to instruct.

Great expectations preceded "Cherry", Karr's second memoir. After all, its predecessor, 1995's dazzling "The Liars' Club", an account of her hardscrabble Texas childhood, virtually jump-started the latest memoir craze. Happily, "Cherry" delivers. Karr still has her delicious knack for making you guffaw through horrible events, but this volume, which focuses on her adolescence in the late '60s and early '70s, is decidedly sunnier than its predecessor.

There are vivid evocations of young desire -- at one vulnerable moment, her whole body starts to hum like a "locust singing inside its husk" -- and memorable characters. The rememberances begin to get hazy and drag a bit as Karr becomes increasingly drug-addled in her teen years. Is "Cherry" as good as "The Liars' Club"? Not quite, but its humor, warmth and crackling language should keep Karr's fans hungering for another round.

The Liar's Club was one of the most poignant, funny, shocking, stunningly written memoirs ever. Cherry continues where Liar's Club left off, and every single sentence is an incredible work of poetic mastery. Mary's dangerously eccentric family (dysfunctional doesn't even BEGIN to describe this odd assortment of people), and her poisonous, dead-end hometown of Leechfield return - but Mary's coming-of-age is the focus in Cherry. The fact that this bizarre family and ugly little town helped to create a author who works magic with the written word is amazing! If you've read The Liar's Club, you MUST read Cherry. If you missed The Liar's Club, start with it and I promise you'll want to read this new one also.