Mimi Pond

A fast-paced semi-memoir about diners, drugs, and California in the 1970s Over Easy is a brilliant portrayal of a familiar coming-of-age story. After being denied financial aid to cover her last year of art school, Margaret finds salvation from the straightlaced world of college and the earnestness of both hippies and punks in the wisecracking, fast-talking, drug-taking group she encounters at the Imperial Café, where she makes the transformation from Margaret to Madge. At first she mimics these new and exotic grown-up friends, trying on the guise of adulthood with some awkward but funny stumbles. Gradually she realizes that the adults she looks up to are a mess of contradictions, misplaced artistic ambitions, sexual confusion, dependencies, and addictions. Over Easy is equal parts time capsule of late 1970s life in California--with its deadheads, punks, disco rollers, casual sex, and drug use--and bildungsroman of a young woman who grows from a naïve, sexually inexperienced art-school dropout into a self-aware, self-confident artist. Mimi Pond's chatty, slyly observant anecdotes create a compelling portrait of a distinct moment in time. Over Easy is an immediate, limber, and precise semi-memoir narrated with an eye for the humor in every situation.

Over Easy

A young woman’s art career begins to lift off as those around her succumb to addiction and alcoholism The Customer is Always Wrong is the continuing saga of a young naïve artist working in a restaurant of drunks, junkies, thieves, and creeps. Oakland in the late seventies is a scuzzy, low-rent warzone and Mimi Pond folds the tales of the sleaze-ball characters that surround her into her workaday waitressing life. Outrageous and loving tributes and takedowns of her co-workers and satellites of the Imperial Cafe create a snapshot of a time in Mimi’s life where she encounters who she is, and who she is not. Told in the same brash yet earnest style as her previous memoir Over Easy, Pond’s storytelling gifts have never been stronger than in this epic, comedic novel. She drops readers right back at the Imperial with its great coffee and depraved cast, where things only get worse for the addicts and alcoholics surrounding her while her career as a cartoonist starts to take off.

Mimi Pond

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