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Pretty yummy especially the first half. tw: self harm, bad drug trips, attempted suicide.
So grateful not to have grown up a girl in East Texas in the 1970s. So grateful Mary Karr did. Her voice cuts through the teenage wasteland, drilling through the mist of sex, drugs, and confusion to emerge with the story of a young woman trying to find her place in the world and a sense of self.
Im not sure if I understood the thrust of this book. Unlike The Liars Club, the vignettes here scatter and flit and never coalesce. Perhaps that was the point; adding meaning and a through-line to life is something we make up after the fact. Its not there in the experiencing of it. Maybe the final page just left me with a “thats it”? And maybe its impacted by the strange, ephemeral quality of this week.
I don’t know. Like her other memoir, her insights and language are striking and lovely. I still enjoyed the read, although I closed the book on the last sentence feeling more hollow than anything, in spite of the final attempt at a conclusion.
I don’t know. Like her other memoir, her insights and language are striking and lovely. I still enjoyed the read, although I closed the book on the last sentence feeling more hollow than anything, in spite of the final attempt at a conclusion.
Nicely written memoir of coming of age in the 70s. Very natural voice, but the subject material was not uplifting.
Totally believable account of acid trip in a backcountry Texas juke joint...Karr is a consummate memoirist and just a great writer.
So basically, this is a good book, but it doesn't hold a candle to her previous memoir, "The Liars Club." That book was transcendent in its exploration of what it means to craft the story of your own past. "Cherry," in contrast, lacks a unifying theme (is it about sex? Drugs? Surfing?). Still, no one writes like Karr. As a poet, she just kills it in her descriptive language. So I look forward now to moving on to the last book in her trilogy, "Lit," which seems to be the most highly regarded of the bunch.
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
fast-paced
A follow-up memoir to The Liar's Club , which I loved. This one failed to capture my interest as completely from the beginning and I don't think I finished it. (To be fair, at the time I read it, I almost never read nonfiction.)
adventurous
funny
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Well-written, but definitely not on par with her other works. Once she reaches high school, the prose starts to feel lazy, and not in a clever, "oh-she's-stoned" kind of way. The first half was wonderful--the evolving depiction of her daddy is excellently and subtly done. However. I started I feel detached toward the end.