We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). More importantly, her clear-eyed recollection of what it’s like to change from child into woman resonates with truth. Accelerating substance abuse leads to arrest and a horrendous, acid-laced night at Effie’s Go-Go bar, whose terrifying patrons inspire Karr to one of those chemically assisted moments of revelation: “There’s no place like home.” She leaves home soon enough, however, bound for California, where her new life as drug-free poet and writer will soon begin.Įnergized by Karr’s sharp wit, this tale of Texas adolescence reads like a fast-paced novel. She candidly depicts a muffed eighth-grade suicide attempt and high-school years passed in a blur of drugs (the time is the late 1960s and early ’70s) as she tried to escape the paralyzing monotony and psychic brutality of life in Leechfield. Karr vividly captures those moments that are so important to a girl growing up, and explains why they are important. But they don’t stave off prepubescent self-consciousness, like the terrible shame of the huge pimple on her forehead exposed to her sixth-grade crush, or the pain when her best friend moves on to another best friend, or the humiliation that her first real date is with the town’s ranking dweeb, who is also a proselytizing Mormon.

Karr’s strange family has pushed her to the social outskirts, and she buries herself in books and fantasies. The author’s much-married mother, bemused father, and angry sister Lecia are all still in place new characters include surfers who nod out at the beach every weekend, the sweet college boy who was her first lover, and a bouquet of remarkable girlfriends, unlikely blooms among Leechfield’s insular population. Fans of Karr’s award-winning The Liars’ Club (1995) will not be disappointed by this feisty, funny, and tender memoir of a drug-ridden coming of age in Leechfield, her Texas hometown.

Cherry by mary karr