Cherry by Mary Karr (2000)

The second memoir by the American poet.

Memoir Review: Cherry followed closely after Mary Karr's third book of poetry, Viper Rum (1998), and five years after her wildly successful and revolutionary first memoir, The Liars' Club (1995). That book mostly addressed certain moments in her childhood and her relationship with her unconventional parents. At times it ventured into freak show territory that few of us have experienced. Now in Cherry Karr examines those awkward years and moments of girl into woman before adulthood in 1960s and '70s America. There is more here that will resonate with more people. Despite very different backgrounds, we're all people reacting to the world around us and at some point we were all teenagers doing the best we could. Somehow we lived through those years, though not all of us. Although The Liars' Club (this a sort of sequel) may be a better book, here Karr was trying new techniques, new approaches, mixing things up. This story of female adolescence and young love gave her more room to cut loose. The second half of the book presents the dark and troubled side of drug use, which may have enabled her to drift through her East Texas ennui, but didn't do much good for a lot of her friends. Sowing wild oats can be tricky. Cherry lets Karr as an adult look back on her time as a child, with greater wisdom, knowledge, and rue. As a child she was prescient, having planned "to write ½ poetry and ½ autobiography." She (eventually) succeeded in doing both, and as a poet Karr captures emotion well, making it easy to relate to her youthful explorations of the world and the social structures built around her. What Bonjour Tristesse presented as fiction, Cherry gives us as fact. A friend notes the distinction between "a world created rather than a world described," and Karr's poetry is heavily autobiographical also. At one point she cites the poet Bill Knott, one of my own favorites. Mary Karr is the exception to my irrational aversion to memoir, perhaps because as a poet become memoirist she manages to blur the lines between the two.  [4★]