It was the seventies and she quickly fell in with a group of surfer boys and their hangers-on, which suited her contrarian nature and need to push back against the often pointless authoritarianism of her high school. She eventually makes friends and then discovers both boys and drugs. At the start of the story, Mary is a bookish girl in a place that did not value intelligence, and especially not in women. This is her follow up to that memoir, taking the reader through her teenage years. Mary Karr is best known for her memoir of a childhood spent in a rough and tumble Texas town. I read the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and fancied myself running away to Africa to find just such an ape man to swing me from vine to vine. There was a poem about a goat-footed balloon man I recited everyday like a spell, and another about somebody stealing somebody else's plums and saying he was sorry but not really meaning it. But its soaring close proves that from even the smokiest beginnings a solid self can form, one capable of facing down all manner of monsters.That summer I fell into reading as into a deep well where no voice could reach me. Parts will leave you gasping with laughter. Karr's edgy, brilliant prose careens between hilarity and tragedy, and Cherry takes readers to a place never truly explored-deep inside a girl's stormy, ardent adolescence.

Looking for a lover or heart's companion who'll make her feel whole, she hooks up with an outrageous band of surfers and heads, wannabe yogis and bona fide geniuses. She lands all too often in the principal's office and-in one instance-a jail cell. In this long-awaited sequel, we see Karr ultimately trying to run from the thrills and terrors of her sexual awakwening by butting against authority in all its forms. Karr picks up the trail and dashes off into her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom.

But it left people wondering: How'd that scrappy kid make it outta there? Cherry dares to tell that story. The Liar's Club rode the top of The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, and publications ranging from The New Yorker to People picked it as one of the best books of the year. Mary Karr told the prize-winning tale of her hardscrabble Texas childhood with enough literary verve to spark a renaissance in memoir.

Cherry by mary karr