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Angst of adolescence with a hard-edged sense of humor Nov 11, 2000 (21 of 22 found this helpful)
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.
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Not a sequel to The Liar's Club Oct 11, 2000 (36 of 43 found this helpful)
"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.
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Little Mary Half-Grown Nov 4, 2001 (8 of 8 found this helpful)
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.
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A Joyless Memoir Nov 20, 2000 (26 of 32 found this helpful)
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.
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Beautifully Written Memoirs of an Excrutiating Adolescence Oct 8, 2000 (19 of 23 found this helpful)
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.