Name: Cherry
ISBN: 9780786232307

Mary Karr

In the Liars' club, Mary Karr told the tale of her hardscrabbles Texas childhood with enough literary verve to spark a renaissance in memoirs.

A Memoir

Cherry

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).

Colton Ray

This was an interesting tale of a girl growing up and pushing against the boundaries of the life laid out for her. It spans the range of her childhood, starting with a girl who doesn't fit in and moving to a teenager experimenting with love and sex, and on to a twentysomething getting caught in the drug craze of the 1970s and the penalties that come with it. (view spoiler)[It was a powerfully relatable moment when she was sitting in jail and wanting to tell the police that she was the same girl that won the spelling bee in elementary school. (hide spoiler)] Throughout, you get the sense that although Mary Karr made some questionable decisions, she was a good person at heart. Autobiographies are supposed to give you a full, unvarnished look at the whole and scope of a person's life, and Cherry accomplished exactly that.

The author shares a candid look at her own sexual maturity growing up in a Texas town.

Jade Flynn

Gritty, raw and candid. Not as impactful as  The Liar's Club (which I recommend reading first) but it's a solid continuation of Mary's life story. Will certainly be reading Lit in the future. Masterful prose, as always.

In this paperback of her long-awaited sequel, we find Karr once again trying to run from the thrills and terrors of her psychological and physical awakening by violently crashing up against authority in all its forms, shuttling between the principal's office and the jail cell. Yearning, like a typical teenager, for the ideal love or heart's companion who will make her feel whole again, she throws in her lot with an varied and outrageous band; surfers, yogis, bona fide geniuses. Karr's edgy, brilliant prose careens between hilarity and tragedy. Although there are other memoirs that pay close attention to the process of self-creation and destruction that young girls go through, with all its accompanying anguish, self-consciousness and inertia, there is no one who writes about it like Mary Karr. Her prose is lustrous and cinematic, her humour earthy and irresistible. And the dramas and happenings of her life are of an intensity that few others ever experience.

Cherry A Memoir

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