CHERRY - Mary Karr - Nonfiction

Oh, Mary Karr. Upon hearing of the release of her most recent memoir, LIT, I decided to revisit her first two memoirs (or perhaps, the first two installments of an ongoing memoir), CHERRY and THE LIAR'S CLUB. The library chose to give me CHERRY first, which was ironic because I used to own a copy of CHERRY, but gave it away when I confused it with BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA and thought I had already read it. As it turns out, CHERRY isn't the child-abuse and sexual molestation story that BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA is, although it does foreshadow (backshadow?) an earlier childhood sexual assault which is presumably detailed in THE LIAR'S CLUB. CHERRY glances over Mary's childhood, and focuses primarily on her pubescent life, from the time she enters middle school to her leaving home for California after high school.

Karr's adolescence is entertaining enough, containing the sorts of remembered details and specific conversations that one doubts actually persist with anyone through decades of life, and most likely reflect a biased recollection; given this personal bias, it is commendable how disagreeable Mary often comes off. Initially, her escapades are relatable and sympathetic. She and her sister look for their depressed mother when she fails to return home one night; Mary fantasizes over a boy in her class who seems, as they do at that age, impossibly perfect; Mary befriends an older girl in the neighborhood who is equally spirited, and then has to come to terms with her friend's desertion upon entering high school and becoming involved with more grown-up pursuits (here represented by being a candy striper.)

Then Mary goes to high school, and all hell breaks loose--or rather, doesn't. Despite run-ins with the predatorily deranged principal, and an overnight lockup after being arrested with a group of teens carrying marijuana, Mary remains mostly unscathed, and spends her time lounging in her best friend's living room, reading novels and thinking of poetry. In fact, the dreamy picture such a literarily-minded young woman conjures has to be somewhat rose-tinted by memory; Mary is an indifferent student who spends all her time with drug addicts, going surfing along the Texan gulf coast, and skinny-dipping further inland. She is left to her own devices (her parents' explicit parenting philosophy being that whatever she is physically capable of doing, she is old enough to do) and miraculously this seems to work out. It is astonishing how lax her parents are about her activities, as reflected in the introductory scene of Mary's departure, in which her father spends about five minutes thinking about the fact that he may never see his daughter again, and then goes back to watching a game show. We get the sense that her parents have problems of their own; Mary's mother is going back to college for the degree she always wanted, but is plagued by depression and is unhappy in her marriage, while Mary's father seems continually misunderstood and sidelined in her family's dramatic existence. In the midst of this, Mary is preoccupied with LSD.

Mary's story never quite comes full circle; we know that she and a group of friends leave for California, but the last scene we are given in the otherwise chronological narrative is of her and a different set of friends visiting a bar so far on the wrong side of the tracks that it may well be served by a different rail line. The bar is predominately African-American, ambiguously gendered, drugged-up, and full of a sort of incoherently sketched menace that really doesn't make sense, given the drugged-up and ambiguously sexual nature of Mary's previous pursuits. Yet, this trip to the bar and the successful extrication of themselves from it at the end of the night has the importance of a battle to Mary, who recounts it through her best friend's window, insisting that the moral of the story is "there's no place like home." Of course, Mary leaves home shortly after, so the lesson may be lost, as many other lessons seem to be, including that very brief jail stint, and the spectacle of her mother, educated but failing to find her own way.

I don't read much memoir, but Mary Karr has certainly made an impact on the genre. Her childhood skates the edge of being exploitatively bad (see Dorothy Allison, above), and manages to provide some redeeming life lessons in pluck, perseverance, and family, which do the reader the favor of being lightly handled. And yet, on the outskirts of this memoir are issues of privilege hinted at but not addressed: why are Mary and her friends so uncomfortable in the bar? Why does Mary get out of jail with a slap on the wrist, and not wonder or inquire as to the punishments of the friends she was brought in with? Why does Mary seem so oblivious to her best friend's dire financial circumstances, when I can certainly remember being well aware of these issues at a much younger age? Perhaps these omissions foreshadow the stumbling blocks in LIT, which describes the road from Mary's ambition of being a poet and memoirist to her realization of these very occupations.