Cherry

  Rave Reviews for Mary Karr and Cherry

  “Karr captures, exactly, what it’s like for a girl to kiss the first boy she loves.…She captures, exactly, what it’s like to start high school.…She captures, exactly, what it’s like to be a book-hungry teenager, enraptured by the words and heady ideas that offer transport from the banalities of small-town life.…As she did in The Liars’ Club, Ms. Karr combines a poet’s lyricism and a Texan’s down-home vernacular with her natural storytelling gift.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “A compelling ride through [Karr’s] adolescence.…What distinguishes Karr is the ability to serve up her experiences in a way that packs the wallop of immediacy with the salty tang of adult reflection…her descriptions of the bruised-lip, druggy wonder of teenage love are precise, unsentimental, and lovely.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “The Liars’ Club left no doubt that Mary Karr could flat out write…the one question everyone had upon finishing her story was, could she do it again? Cherry lays that question to rest once and for all.…It never lacks for those trademark Karr details, but it’s about all of us.”

  —Newsweek

  “A smart, searing memoir.…Romance, in all of its wondrous and heartbreaking incarnations, is Karr’s great subterranean subject, the ground upon which her wily, whip-smart writing catches root.”

  —Lisa Shea, Elle

  Stunning.…If The Liars’ Club succeeded partly because of its riveting particularity, Cherry succeeds because of its universality. The first book is about one harrowing childhood, the second about every adolescence. She can turn even the most mundane events into gorgeous prose.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Cherry is the kind of book a brave parent could do a lot worse than to give to a teenager.…Teenage girls might come away from it knowing that they’re not freaks, that mistakes aren’t fatal, and that good writing kisses just about everything better. And for teenage boys, reading Cherry would be like stealing the other team’s playbook.…Mary Karr gives memoir back its good name.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Here, intact, is the smart, sassy, wickedly observant voice first met in The Liars’ Club, a voice that knows how to tell a story in a crackling vernacular that feels exactly true to its setting.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Cherry delivers. Karr still has her delicious knack for making you guffaw through horrible events…its humor, warmth, and crackling language should keep Karr’s fans hungering for another round.”

  —People

  “Karr writes about adolescence with the same emotional precision that illuminated her account of childhood…[she] nails with wonderful specificity the complex way adolescents bond intellectually and emotionally. Her descriptions of her early sexual experiences are also original. Her language is frank without becoming clinical, and she captures the swooning tenderness of a kiss without sounding sentimental…firmly rooted though it is in a particular time and place, Cherry, like all serious autobiographies, is about something much more universal: the construction of a satisfying identity or, more precisely, the discovery of a fundamental self that was there all along.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “It’s the powerful spiked punch of Karr’s writing that amazes.…Cherry is about the dizzy funk of female teen sexuality, and Karr captures the innocence and dirt of it, the hunger and the thrill, with exquisite pitch. Karr’s connection to her younger sexual self is profound with mercy or nostalgia.…Karr identifies the vulnerable, frightening gap between most girls’ night thoughts and those in the day.…Right now, in this remembrance of blooming, Karr continues to set the literary standard for making the personal universal.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “This book is best when it portrays things common to all of us in adolescence. The woeful sense of isolation. The fierce desire to have friends. The agitated, wondrous discovery of things sexual. Those awkward kisses in the dark. And the risks.”

  —USA Today

  “This book is about being a female adolescent, a horrible fate; the best that can be said of it is that one does recover. The extraordinary thing about Karr, in addition to the poetry of her writing, is her stunning honesty.”

  —Molly Ivins, Ft. Worth Star-Telegram

  “Awesomely written.…Cherry is beautifully wrought and tart in its angst-wrangling.…Karr can render sentences so powerful as to make you bow your head in reverence.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Cherry is beautifully written, without a single word wasted. Karr’s poetic yet tensile language creates exceptional landscapes, both physical and emotional…her broad but precise descriptions, coupled with piercing insights into the sometimes agonizing trials of growing up, create fully realized characters with whom the reader can immediately empathize.…Hardly a soul alive hasn’t felt exiled in the dark territory of adolescence; Karr maps this landscape expertly and candidly.”

  —The San Diego Union

  “Step aside, J. D. Salinger, and take your alter ego Holden Caulfield with you. Mary Karr has staked out your turf, the upended land of adolescence. And she is just smart, angry, sensitive and self-mocking enough to defend it with everything she’s got…this time Karr has created another fiercely poetic and alternately bruising, comic, and picaresque account of her wild and painful journey through early adolescence. And if ever the tortuous metamorphosis from caterpillar to damaged butterfly has been captured in print, this is it…the tales of her first serious crush, first kiss and first date [are] each gorgeously delineated in all their tragicomic dimensions, and unique in the way they capture the overwhelming combination of attraction and repulsion involved in early sexual experiences. But everything Karr touches is emblazoned with this raw honesty and a sense of the breathtaking confusion and emotional terrorism of adolescence.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Cherry, Karr’s riveting, high-octane sequel to The Liars’ Club, disproves F. Scott Fitzgerald’s oft-quoted piece of wisdom about there being no second acts in American lives…it is the kind of book that leaves you exhausted with pleasure—for the jigsaw music of its language, its unyielding candor, and the vignettes of adolescence that barrel down on you with all the force of a life reimagined with heartbreaking humor and sadness.…It’s about time that teenage girls have their stories told. Karr’s account of her teenage years is a universal chronicle of the boredom and skin-tingling excitement that is the essence of growing up—anywhere.…Karr remembers with such vividness that the story strikes the reader with the force of literature, the power of experience felt at that instant.…She is each of us as an adolescent—yearning, romantic, racing against our own heartbeats.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Karr’s eloquent tome on her tumultuous teen years is not just another memoir…her masterful concatenations of language are downright addictive.…She has taken the courageous step of stepping back fully into that sometimes unlovely adolescent self, a place where pride, self-loathing, euphoria, idealism and rage stutter and roil so violently that emotions are hard to pin down from one moment to the next. Karr articulates this roller coaster of sensation and experience with razor-sharp authenticity.…Cherry offers a genuine and eloquent portrait of what adolescence could be like for women of the baby boomer generation.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Cherry is a bittersweet look at first kisses, first loves and first times, those mutable moments that somehow become trapped like insects in amber…it is also a layered examination of the many ways in which we grow from children to adults, assembling ourselves as unique individuals, separate from our families and our villages.…As much as Cherry is a coming-of-age story, it is also the explanation of h
ow a woman can emerge from her tangled history.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “This sequel to The Liars’ Club takes us where few female memoirists dare to tread—adolescence. Karr’s small East Texas hometown may be surly, but her depiction of how she got out of it is warm, unsparing, and filled with humor…she manages to evoke both the peculiarities of the ’70s and the universal humiliation connected with coming-of-age.”

  —The Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “By some alchemy of words we get within the teenager standing in the tremulous green light of a bathroom, watching her friend twist the razor’s stem so the safety hinges open ‘like a magic doorway.’ Again and again, Karr goes inside the dangers, the devastations of coming of age.…Cherry is a tour of the mind, conducted with the pitiless deliberation of art.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Mary Karr’s scorching memoir of the ’70s picks up where The Liars’ Club left off…her lickety-split sentences combine what she calls her daddy’s gift of voice with her own poet’s sensibility to make Cherry an amazing experiment in language as well as story.”

  —The Portland Oregonian

  “Fans of Karr’s award-winning The Liars’ Club will not be disappointed by this feisty, funny, and tender memoir of a drug-ridden coming of age.…Karr vividly captures those moments that are so important to a girl growing up, and explains why they are important.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Moving effortlessly from breathtaking to heart stabbing to laugh out loud raucous, the precision and sheer beauty of Karr’s writing remains outstanding.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Cherry

  a memoir

  MARY KARR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 2000

  Published in Penguin Books 2001

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Mary Karr, 2000

  All rights reserved

  A portion of this work first appeared in The New Yorker.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

  Dream Song #14 from The Dream Songs by John Berryman. Copyright © 1969 by John Berryman. Copyright renewed 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  “A Prayer” and “Legend” from Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley. Translation copyright © Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  “Ode to Joy” from Selected Poems: Miroslav Holub, translated by Ian Milner and George Theiner (Penguin Books, 1967). Copyright © Miroslav Holub, 1967. Translation copyright © Penguin Books Ltd, 1967. By permission of the publisher.

  Selection from The Kabir Book: Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir, Versions by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1971, 1977 by Robert Bly. By permission of Beacon Press.

  “Storm Windows” from New & Selected Poems by Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago Press, 1960). Copyright © 1960 by The University of Chicago. By permission of Margaret Nemerov.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Karr, Mary.

  Cherry: a memoir / Mary Karr.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65074-5

  1. Karr, Mary—Childhood and youth. 2. Poets, American—20th century—Biography.

  I. Title.

  PS3561.A6929 Z465 2000

  811’.54—dc21

  [B] 00–35199

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Janson MT • Designed by Lorelle Graffeo

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the

  condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out,

  or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding

  or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

  including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  To Bob & Vanette, Mary Ellen & Patti,

  and Doonie

  And to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Courtney Hodell first bought this book for Viking, then spent years cajoling it into existence. Her customarily brilliant edits were indispensable. So were the ongoing confidence and readings of my friend and agent Amanda Urban, the final pass by Paul Slovak, and the tireless appraisals in this and all efforts from my assistant, Betsy Hogan. Plus Don DeLillo.

  My son, Dev Milburn, endured the writing process while acing junior high with a grace that threw my own adolescence into stark relief. As a kid and an anthropological presence, he was (and is) a wonder.

  During several long winters, three families welcomed and sustained us—specifically John Holohan’s clan, Jack and Mary Hogan, and all the Pascales (Chuck and Lynn, Neal and Deb, Tony and Millie). Childhood friends who shared stories and pictures along the way were Vanette Atchley, Cindy Cannon, and Bob Perry.

  Finally, three pals served as constant touchstones: Mary Ellen Blade, Patti Mora, and Kent Scott.

  —To all these, I bow my head.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE Elementary’s End

  TWO Midway

  THREE Limbo

  FOUR High

  PROLOGUE California 1972

  Time’s march is a web of causes and effects, and asking for any gift of mercy, however tiny it might be, is to ask that a link be broken in that web of iron, ask that it be already broken. No one deserves such a miracle.

  —Jorge Luis Borges A Prayer

  Translated by Andrew Hurley

  NO ROAD OFFERS MORE MYSTERY than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars—bills you’ve saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you’ve done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.

  It’s best if you set out on this quest with friends equally young, because then all of you will be carried through several days’ sleepless drive and infrequent pee-stops across massive scorched desert by a collective hallucinogenic insomnia that turns the gigantic cacti into (alternately) first a guitar-toting mystic and then a phantom hitchhiker and finally into a spangled matador cutting veronicas above the sand floor. You will be carried past these metaphorical monsters by the fire and wonder of your collective yearning toward your chosen spot, the black dot on the map at which your young-muscled bodies will be fired. In this case, Los Angeles.

  Los Angeles. You’ve never been there, never been to any city that newscasters mention on TV. Still, in the three months since you’ve decided to head for California, you like to lie on the bare floor your mom let you yank the carpet out of and then lacquer black while you say the city’s name over and over as in prayer. Los Angeles, Los Angeles. You know almost nothing about the place, so while you’re waiting for your friends to come in a blue truck to ferry you off, you stare at its spot on the map, as though peerin
g close enough will split the small dark seed of your future and reveal whatever self you’re fixing to become.

  You know this won’t happen, of course. You’re not exactly stupid. You’re only standing in your shitty yard on the brink of what will be a vaporously hot morning waiting for the blue truck with questionable fuel pump and worn brakes to take you the fuck out of there. You look up the road. Nothing: a pink sky, the same warped curve of blacktop leading to the stop sign. The map you got in a neat rectangle at the Fina station now surges in your hands under the light wind.

  So much comes from California, and now you’re going there, to the origins of things. The LSD you call orange sunshine looks like baby aspirin and comes (in name if not in fact) from Orange County, California. It’s just one more totem of the Golden State that set you yearning for it.

  If you had your druthers, you’d all be setting out for northern California, San Francisco specifically. That’s where Haight-Ashbury is (The Hate, your right-wing sister calls it). On TV and in Rolling Stone magazine and in books like Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, you’re told this place is aswarm with longhaired boys—blond and anorectic looking. These boys are not like the meat-eating, car-disemboweling, football-watching, squirrel-murdering boys you grew up dodging spitballs from. These west coast boys subsist on brown rice and ceramic bowls of clear broth in which sheer ideograms of seaweed float. Unlike the boys of your town, who (for the most part) read nothing but the football scores, or (for the surfers anyway) the tidal charts of the newspapers in order to paddle out just before the best waves break, these California boys have rooms lined with books. They know their astrological rising signs and the names of constellations and how to weave plain old string into beaded macramé belts that you can sell outside rock concerts for some bucks apiece.

  These boys occupy more and more of your conscious thought. Lying on your Sears trundle bed with the Mexican throw you picked up on a surfing expedition, you picture their long torsos and shirtless chests above their low-slung Levis.