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A review by tipi
Cherry by Mary Karr
5.0
Structurally, Mary Karr's second memoir, Cherry, is almost identical to its prequel, The Liars' Club. Karr summarizes the central events of her adolescence with such a clear attention to detail that she's either prodigious or disingenuous, and I can't decide which. Perhaps the exhaustiveness of the project can be explained away by Karr's photographic memory, but I think it's more likely a consequence of her tendency to embellish the truth. She is a poet after all. Yet the details she chooses to include are unpredictable enough to be stranger than fiction, and perhaps they are. Either way, authentic or not, Karr is one of the greatest scene-setters I've ever come across, and Cherry is one of the best books I've ever read. Not only is it more focused than The Liars' Club, but its focus is my favorite topic of all: romance. Whenever she writes about her middle school crush on her next door neighbor, John Cleary, it's just about the cutest stuff I've ever read. It's a reminder of how romance is simpler and in many ways better before we've fully matured; we're still too young to even try putting our mushy feelings into words, so instead even our smallest actions are loaded with coded significance. Entire chapters could be written about doing homework at a crush's house past sunset, which is exactly what Karr does. An inattentive onlooker probably wouldn't notice anything at all.
Cherry is about coming-of-age, and Karr's seems straight out of a movie. It's filled with many of the genre's biggest clichн©sдуоespecially high school's headlong cliquishnessдуоbut Karr makes it all feel brand new. Like all of my literary heroes, she has always been an Outsider, but the outsider cliques with which she identifies begins to shift rapidly as she navigates her way through high school. She goes from being one of her school's biggest nerds to one of its biggest stoners in a matter of months. And while anybody who's been to high school knows that this sort of transience is par for the course, what distinguishes her rendering of the high-school-shapeshifter clichн© is her brilliant awareness of it. It may just be because hindsight is 20/20, but she always seems to know that "it's just a phase." Even as a high schooler, she exalts Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye as her literary hero (whereas most of us only began to grasp the stature of his character after we became jaded to the game of popularity once high school had become a distant past), and it's easy to see why. She has a sociological fascination with how high schoolers interact, one that often makes her feel lonely. it's as if she's the only one among her classmates who cares enough to stop and think critically about all the changes accompanying the most developmental years of their lives. She sometimes feels as if she's the only one willing to acknowledge this popularity game which everyone is playing. That's what it means to be an Outsider. That's what it means to be my biggest literary hero since Holden Caulfield.
Cherry is about coming-of-age, and Karr's seems straight out of a movie. It's filled with many of the genre's biggest clichн©sдуоespecially high school's headlong cliquishnessдуоbut Karr makes it all feel brand new. Like all of my literary heroes, she has always been an Outsider, but the outsider cliques with which she identifies begins to shift rapidly as she navigates her way through high school. She goes from being one of her school's biggest nerds to one of its biggest stoners in a matter of months. And while anybody who's been to high school knows that this sort of transience is par for the course, what distinguishes her rendering of the high-school-shapeshifter clichн© is her brilliant awareness of it. It may just be because hindsight is 20/20, but she always seems to know that "it's just a phase." Even as a high schooler, she exalts Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye as her literary hero (whereas most of us only began to grasp the stature of his character after we became jaded to the game of popularity once high school had become a distant past), and it's easy to see why. She has a sociological fascination with how high schoolers interact, one that often makes her feel lonely. it's as if she's the only one among her classmates who cares enough to stop and think critically about all the changes accompanying the most developmental years of their lives. She sometimes feels as if she's the only one willing to acknowledge this popularity game which everyone is playing. That's what it means to be an Outsider. That's what it means to be my biggest literary hero since Holden Caulfield.