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Mary Karr
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Cherry : A Memoir Paperback – January 1, 2002

by Mary Karr (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 640 ratings
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This memoir of adolescence follows the earlier volume by Mary Karr, The Liars' Club. In Cherry, we find Karr once again trying to run from the thrills and terrors of her psychological and physical awakening by violently crashing up against authority in all its forms, shuttling between the principal's office and the jail cell. Yearning, like a typical teenager, for the ideal love or heart's companion who will make her feel whole again, she throws in her lot with a varied and outrageous band: surfers, yogis and bona fide geniuses.
Previous page
  1. Book 2 of 3
    The Liars' Club
  2. Print length
    288 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Pan MacMillan
  5. Publication date
    January 1, 2002
  6. Dimensions
    5.12 x 0.63 x 7.76 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0330485768
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0330485760
  9. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pan MacMillan (January 1, 2002)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0330485768
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0330485760
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.12 x 0.63 x 7.76 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 640 ratings

About the author

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Mary Karr

Mary Karr

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Mary Karr's first memoir, The Liar's Club, kick-started a memoir revolution and won nonfiction prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, it rode high on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, becoming an annual "best book" there and for The New Yorker, People, and Time. Recently Entertainment Weekly rated it number four in the top one hundred books of the past twenty-five years. Her second memoir, Cherry, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, also hit bestseller and "notable book" lists at the New York Times and dozens of other papers nationwide. Her most recent book in this autobiographical series, Lit: A Memoir, is the story of her alcoholism, recovery, and conversion to Catholicism. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays. Other grants include the Whiting Award and Radcliffe's Bunting Fellowship. She is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
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640 global ratings
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Top reviews from the United States

Emel Djeipah
5.0 out of 5 stars LOVE Mary Karr !
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2023
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My only problem with Karr's books is that they end. I want to stay in her world , which feels like her heart and somehow my heart as well. Her language is at once lyrical and grounded. Seeing her recreate her past so intimately seems to urge me to do the same and I honestly think reading her memoirs has benefitted my therapy.
3 people found this helpful
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Bill Slocum
4.0 out of 5 stars A Remembrance Of Innocence Lost
Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2004
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What does Mary Karr have left to prove? She already wrote the definitive memoir of a child's life in an East Texas hellhole, "The Liars' Club," which as a first-person narrative remains better than anything I've ever come across. Why risk another trip to the well? Can you exceed expectations when so many of them, like mine, are off the charts?

I'm in a funny position writing this, because I expected to come here and write about my disappointment with "Cherry," why it wasn't up to par with "Liars' Club." But reading all the one- and two-star reviews, some of which raise valid points, others of which are just all wet, I feel a little more protective about what I just read.

No, it's not as involving as "Liars' Club." Karr isn't the passive youngster anymore, and she takes on a wider swath of her life, from just before sixth grade all the way up through high school, meaning there isn't the concentration of time that worked with "Liars' Club." Our narrator is changing this time, and quickly.

More problematic, there is Karr's use of the second-person singular for the bulk of the book, describing her actions as if you are her. It doesn't work, feeling arch and odd instead of inclusive. Karr's budding sensibilities as a poet also come into play, with the help of a friend suspiciously named Meredith Bright, and you either will identify with their precocious conversations on absurdist theater or, like me, feel distanced by it. But it's her life, and she should tell it as it is.

The best part of the book is its first third, with its account of elementary and junior high school life. Karr's sharp eye for detail and her fluidity with language, so stunning in "Liars' Club," doesn't fail her here. She recalls the posture of a picked-on classmate "till her whole body became a sort of living question mark, the punctuation with which she responded to every mean sentence we could construct." Then there's her fear when approached by a boy she likes: "Part of me is also crazily rewinding to play back my whole walk across the field, for surely I did some stupid thing. I wouldn't pick my nose or anything...but I could have been skipping or singing some goofy song under my breath."

Later, she will find herself recruited to give this same boy a long leg massage, in a riotously funny passage in which she gets hot and bothered learning the critical distinction between gastrocs and hamstrings.

While people here note the presence of drugs, in all fairness they don't show up for more than a hundred pages, and she doesn't exactly turn into Ozzy Osbourne. She smokes some joints, and tries a few other things, but seems a bit removed from the drug culture even as she writes about it. Actually, I was glad to have the drugs come into play, as it beat reading about her reading Howard Nemerov. She has sex, too, but is shier about describing that than I would have expected from "Liars' Club."

Karr is a virtuoso at description, and tying up the loose ends of a disorderly life. She makes for exciting, vivid company. If you liked reading Stephen King's "The Body," or Russell Baker's "Growing Up," you will like "Cherry." Even if you didn't like "The Body" or "Growing Up," you will like "Cherry."

But you will like "Liars' Club" so much more.
21 people found this helpful
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Janice R Sampson
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully told by someone who was really there.
Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2017
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I am a contemporary of this author and I loved the REAL insight and narrative. You can always tell when someone is telling a story of the 60's and 70's from what they've heard instead of what they know. Mary knows. I am now in search of every one of her books. It's not just the telling of the story it is the way it is told. I wanted to highlight so much of it to refer to later, but I'd get so engrossed in it that I would forget to mark the parts that I loved. Mary is an amazing author. Every image, every reference is right on.
One person found this helpful
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Pam
3.0 out of 5 stars Writing Style
Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2024
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No doubt Karr is exceptional as a writer, and her detailed and lifelike coming of age account highly entertaining. The style of her writing, though, was hard to follow a lot of times. It didn’t flow well for me, and made it difficult to maintain attention to the storyline.
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William Crosby
5.0 out of 5 stars My life in many particulars
Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2021
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I have completed the trilogy of May Karr’s brilliant memoirs. I suspect that Mary Karr and I are approximately the same age, and while much is different in her story, much is the same so each volume has been special and encouraging. The middle volume, Cherry is often hilarious and perfectly captures the awkward years and ridiculous traumas that are inflicted on too many children. Still, Mary’s resilience and bravery show the way.
2 people found this helpful
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Peggy Vincent
5.0 out of 5 stars Tour de force
Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2003
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Picks up where The Liar's Club left off. Exquisite writing about Mary Karr's volatile, on-the-edge adolescence in a nowhere little town in Texas. Anyone who thinks kids in a small town can't get up to 'mischief' would do well to read Cherry. Karr is talented, brilliant, and challenged by her situation: the child of unreliable, often absent parents who blunder through life as if parenting were a game you can choose to play - or not.
As a writer myself, I found Karr's use of the second person 'you' when referring to herself to be a stunningly successful ploy, a way of showing how adolescents distant themselves from their own lives even in speech and writing. Maturing out of childhood and directly into sexuality, Karr finds her salvation in books and language, but it obviously wasn't easy.
Wonderful writing, scary story, great book.
13 people found this helpful
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L. Richardson
4.0 out of 5 stars Mary Karr can turn a phrase, for sure
Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2010
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I'm just a few years younger than Mary and grew up on the beaches of California in the mid-seventies (also with little supervision), so I could relate to much of the teenage surf and drug culture she describes. I enjoyed comparing Mary's teen years to mine, both occuring during a cutting-edge transitional time in American history--the 1970's. After reading the Liar's Club, I was interested to see how her life turned out, and I felt that this book was a good follow-up to the story of her childhood. The chapters don't follow each other in a direct relationship from one to the next, but they do make progress through the years. The Liar's Club makes a ten (or so) year skip near the end, and this book fills in a lot of that time, but with the focus on herself, not so much on her wacky, selfish, alcoholic mother. Some other reviewers complained about the use of the third person. She doesn't use it all the time, but I thought it added a layer of interest and introspection when she did.
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

jennifer seeley
5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome sauce!
Reviewed in Canada on April 11, 2021
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It arrived two weeks early and in great condition!
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caroljane
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent condition
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 17, 2020
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The book arrived promptly and I was surprised and delighted that it appears to be brand new. Thank you!
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Sparks394
4.0 out of 5 stars Book a little more beat up than expected but overall good.
Reviewed in Canada on March 25, 2016
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Quick delivery. Book a little more beat up than expected but overall good.
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jraya
5.0 out of 5 stars funny and beautifully told
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 27, 2013
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Karr is a poet and it shows. If you like first person coming of age tales, you'll be wildly impressed by how brilliantly she shifts this genre into something fresh and funny and also creates these sentences that remind you why you read in the first place.
One person found this helpful
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Caroline Harborow
5.0 out of 5 stars Memoirs
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 30, 2017
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Excellent memoir. Well written and enjoyable read
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