Cherry

Cherry is Mary Karr's memoir of adolescence, tracing her passage from the cusp of sixth grade through her departure from the industrial refinery town of Leechfield, Texas, at 17.

The memoir opens with a prologue set in 1972, narrated in second person. Seventeen-year-old Mary prepared to leave for Los Angeles in a blue truck with a group of surfer friends, including her close companion Doonie. Inside the house, her father, Pete, a refinery worker in his 60s, coped with her departure by pretending it was not happening. Mary lied about having a safe place to stay. In the kitchen, her mother, Charlie, read art history and confessed she wished she could leave Leechfield too. The group departed with one surfboard hollowed out and packed with marijuana and pharmaceuticals. Karr foreshadows the grim futures awaiting many in the truck: drug-related deaths, suicides, prison, and AIDS.

The narrative rewinds to the summer before sixth grade. Mary was excluded from a classmate's sleepover. Her father pulled refinery shifts or vanished on mysterious rounds; her older sister, Lecia, commanded her own social life; her mother attended college or taught painting to housewives. Mary read voraciously and prowled strange neighborhoods pretending to sell Christmas cards. She entered the home of a grieving woman whose teenage son had shot himself after being rejected at a dance, an encounter that sent her running home, newly aware of hidden losses inside ordinary houses.

Her closest companion became Clarice Fontenot, a girl three years older from a strict Cajun household. Meanwhile, her mother experienced an intellectual revival, devouring college coursework and buying roller skates for an eccentric outing that mortified Lecia. Mary's body became a source of painful self-consciousness. Her crush on John Cleary, a widely beloved blond boy, deepened into obsessive devotion. When she asked her father for bra money and blurted that she wanted "titties," the humiliation was searing. Envying the freedom of shirtless boys, she rode her bicycle bare-chested through the neighborhood, and the horrified stares of neighbor women confirmed that boyhood liberties were vanishing for her.

Domestic instability punctuated these years. Mother disappeared one night, and Lecia, only 13, drove Mary through the county searching for her. They did not find her. Mary read Shakespeare by flashlight, discovering a soliloquy from Richard the Second as a spell against disaster. Mother returned the next morning and revealed she had been attacked on a highway by a man who punched and choked her and threatened to kill her. She had escaped by feigning compliance and fleeing to a store.

On the Fourth of July, a kissing game in her mother's art studio brought Mary her first kiss with John Cleary, a transformative moment. In seventh grade, she visited the Clearys' warm, orderly home to help John with an essay and ended up massaging his sore football legs while his family watched television. That night she experienced her first orgasm, alone in bed. During eighth grade, Clarice withdrew silently from the friendship. When Mary confronted her, Clarice accused Mary of condescension, of thinking she was smarter than everyone. The friendship fractured.

A depressive fog descended. Mary stopped eating, barely attended school, and fixated on poems romanticizing suicide. Mother vanished again, and upon returning, locked herself in the bathroom claiming to have a gun and threatening suicide. Mary shouted at the locked door for her mother to go ahead. Lecia later told Mary plainly that their parents lacked basic sense. Mary wrote a suicide note, swallowed about a dozen Anacin pills, and lay down in a black dress to die. She became nauseated before any real harm occurred; Mother found her vomiting and assumed food poisoning. Told that Mary was sick, Pete drove overnight to Fort Smith, Arkansas, and returned with a bushel of plums. Biting into one, Mary resolved never again to lay a hand against herself so long as there were plums to eat and someone who cared enough to bring them.

High school arrived. Mary entered hoping to reinvent herself but found the unwritten rules for girls extensive and unforgiving. Her mother, who encountered pregnant teenagers through her work, put Mary on birth control before her 15th birthday, and the hormones transformed her body. A date with a popular Cajun boy after a Sadie Hawkins dance ignited intense desire but also surfaced a buried memory of a boy assaulting her seven-year-old body. The passage raises the question of whether this childhood violation explains the confusion of terror and arousal Mary would carry for years.

She fell in love with Phil, a tall senior and former child evangelist turned counterculture figure. Their kisses were elaborate and seemingly infinite, but a schism emerged: At 18, Phil wanted sex; at 15, Mary found the kisses sufficient. He broke up with her over the impasse. Mary's growing defiance of school norms drew administrative hostility; her elderly algebra teacher, Miss Gacy, privately warned her that the administration was trying to expel her.

At a speech tournament, Mary met Meredith Bright, a brilliant new girl from Mississippi who became her intellectual anchor. They bonded instantly when they recited a Howard Nemerov poem from memory, completing each other's lines. Their friendship was built on reading, banter, and a shared sense of having suffered.

Over summer, Mary and Phil reunited and escalated physically. She scheduled her deflowering at Meredith's house while Meredith and another friend played chess in the next room. The act was anticlimactic: Sex replaced the closeness Mary longed for rather than deepening it. When Mary later visited Phil at college, he struck her as goofy and beside the point, and the relationship quietly dissolved.

The Bright family's poverty was severe: Mr. Bright had emptied the bank account and vanished, and Mrs. Bright supported the family on $120 a month working at a dry cleaners. Mary, meanwhile, was absorbed into Doonie's surfer underworld, spending weekends at the Gulf coast around bonfires and taking hallucinogenic mushrooms as the old flower-child ethos of gentleness decayed into cynicism. A county drug bust landed Meredith's brother, Michael, in prison with two four-year sentences while his wealthier roommate received probation, making the correlation between poverty and imprisonment grotesquely visible.

Mary was arrested at a creek gathering on Independence Day and spent terrifying hours in a holding cell before her mother charmed an elderly judge into releasing her. Before Meredith departed for college, Mary watched her cut her own wrists with a razor blade, drawing blood in light strokes. Mary neither stopped her nor told anyone, recognizing years later that witness is tacit approval.

Senior year, every close friend left. Mary attempted sobriety through transcendental meditation but quickly relapsed. One night on acid, she entered Effie's Go-Go, a Black juke joint in Beaumont, where she found a dancer collapsed in the bathroom after injecting heroin, chanting, "Effie say I can sang." The sight crystallized her sense of a world drained of love.

At dawn, Mary rode her childhood bicycle to Meredith's house, home for Easter weekend, and announced her revelation: "There's no place like home." Meredith reminded her the line was from The Wizard of Oz, then offered something more durable: "You're your Same Self." After years of feeling incomplete, something solid was assembling in Mary. Karr acknowledges the notion of a fixed self was only half-achieved, but half was more than some people ever got. The memoir closes with Meredith on her porch, barefoot with suns in her copper hair, touching Mary's shoulder "as if to bestow the right name upon you, the one you'll bear before you through the world, each letter forged into a gleaming shield."