[In the following review, Shulman argues that, despite some problematic elements with the narrative voice in the volume's second half, Cherry is an admirable and “worthy sequel” to The Liars' Club.]

The plot is an ordinary plot: American girl traverses the tricky terrain of adolescence. First bra, first pimple, first love, first kissing game, first date, first real kiss, first period, first smoke (marijuana, it being the late sixties), first betrayal, first run-in with the principal, first sex. Familiar territory: in its key events Mary Karr's school life in 1960s hardscrabble Texas is remarkably like mine in 1940s suburban Ohio, with a cherry's “market value” surprisingly unchanged.

But Cherry is no ordinary book. Karr is a poet, high on language. She won't permit her prose to be violated by a bland verb where a live one will do, and if the right word doesn't exist, she'll make it up. The true hero of this memoir is Karr's slangy, muscular, free-wheeling prose: the English language goes wild with arousal and submits to her will as Karr takes any liberties she likes—flamboyantly ending sentences with prepositions, inventing words, ingeniously tying every episode to the gradual loss of innocence and testing of power that is adolescence.

Verbs break their bonds: “the tears revered between her knobby fingers”; hair “ready to sprong up at any minute”; “I … power-slammed the door into its molding”; “heart fish-flopping inside my rib cage”; “I would have nattered and mullygrubbed at her”; “my voice just foghorns out of me”; “the spit you feel yourself to be writhing on”; “whapping talcum powder on her back.”

Similes and metaphors startle: Shoes “aimed at me from the closet floor like little gunboats fixing to fire.” “He inscribes each letter at such a far forward pitch that you half expect the words themselves to fall over on their faces and pour off the margin.” Kisses are “delicate as origami in their folds and bendings.” “[U]nleashed, this tender boy would throw you to the earth and boff you into guacamole.”

Never before has being stoned, where banalities are experienced as profound revelations, been rendered so precisely, nor a kiss been described so fully:

You often go meandering inside his breath until you feel yourself vanish into the plush warmth of his tongue, each movement of which is a word or piece of punctuation in a conversation so intricate, all your diligence is required to keep up. He runs his tongue along your lower lip like a question, and you return the inquiry. Then in unison your tongues meet all soft on that same territory and glide together the small distance. Touch and withdraw, taste and test. All the light of your being seems to pour into him at such moments, and his into you. His tongue barely spirits along a closed eyelid leaving a light stripe of cool damp. For the whirled cartilage of your ear, it's cyclonic.

(pp. 167-168)

And on.

Cherry is a worthy sequel to the best-selling 1995 memoir The Liars' Club, the story of Karr's early years in a fiercely loving but dysfunctional working-class Texas family, studded by such events as her alcoholic mother's incarceration in a mental hospital, her own rape (at seven), her parents' divorce and subsequent remarriage. In Cherry the personnel are the same: same alcoholic suicidal artistic intellectual mother; same mean and nasty older sister Lecia, an ally when it counts; same doting dad, still working two backbreaking shifts in the oilfields of Leechfield, “this anus of a worm-eaten town,” “this spirit-frying inferno.” But here Karr expands her focus to life outside the family: her love of girlfriends and yearning for boyfriends, her rebellions, her newly awakened passion for drugs, danger, poetry and books.

Not that there aren't events here as shocking as some in The Liars' Club. Karr's mother is raped; Karr herself bungles a suicide attempt; her mother once locks herself in the bathroom with a gun and twice terrifies her daughters by disappearing; Karr and her friends do monumental amounts of drugs and some go to jail. But what chiefly shines through this sequel is Karr's ability, bolstered by family love, to absorb the dangerous, sometimes tragic events with humor, irony, integrity and guts as she struggles toward a self beyond what she calls her “wiseass persona.” We cheer the tenacious spirit of this spunky girl, her will to thrive.

The book is admirable in its unwavering focus. Unlike many childhood memoirs with each episode rendered for its own sake and a structure of and-then-and-then, Karr ties every chapter and event to the yearnings of adolescence: even her mother's scary rape inspires her to speculate on how much sexual attention she herself might command. Beneath the bravado, the pain, the self-absorption (refreshingly mocked by Karr herself) and the flamboyant prose are patches of astute psychological discernment of adolescent feeling, especially about sex. In several passages, Karr observes that having sex can actually diminish pleasure. In another she details how masturbation fantasies may be far less carnal and softer focused than the actual physical events that inspire them. In another she connects desire with fear: “your body seizes up with a fear that masks itself as arousal. … the feelings do favor each other, i.e. sweat rolls down the ribs; breathlessness kicks in; the skin surface becomes hyperalert. It's baffling that you feel phosphorescence gather in your body … given your revulsion at the boy's heavy body and sour kiss.”

Karr manages to make even somber scenes hilarious, like the one in which her mother, who “holds loudly forth on any and all pussy-related subjects,” suggests she get a diaphragm. “Mother! you say with all the virginal outrage you can marshal given the amount of time you spend reading Henry Miller in the bathroom. You've never had a steady boyfriend. Nobody's even ever tried to feel you up.” But “You go along with the birth-control idea because you read somewhere estrogen makes tits bigger and might kick start a girl's period.” The gynecologist, discovering her raped hymen, tries to shame her—“didn't your church teach you better?”—prompting Karr to fantasize: “As a grown-up, you'll consider dropping a note to this green-coated worm of a physician. Tell him how bare you felt inside that paper nightgown. Ask him who died and made him God. Remind him of that oath doctors are meant to take: First do no harm.”

In Cherry, the best girlfriend, that central relationship of girlhood, is as important as boy-love. Clarice, her intimate partner in daring and her first close buddy, drops her because of Karr's “weird” enthusiasms—code for elevated class aspirations. Karr is devastated until a new girl, the astonishingly erudite Meredith Bright, becomes her “heart's companion.” Meredith, a “genius” who can discourse on Pynchon, Dostoyevski and contemporary poetry, is gentle, loyal, serious. It is a pleasure to witness this touching relationship, which advances the intellectual awakening of poetry-hungry Karr.

I was bothered by one aspect of Cherry. Parts One and Two, the first hundred pages, are written in the first person, and the rest, Parts Three and Four, in the sometimes awkward second—all the more disconcerting because the Prologue, probably composed after the book was finished, is also in the second person. Any artistic purpose served by this annoying double switch is invisible to me.

No matter. The canny Karr leaves me hungering for the next installment of her autobiography. Cherry closes where the Prologue opens: at high school's end, with Karr and her surfer gang of druggy boys in a battered truck heading out for California and adventures that lie just beyond the last page.

You pull away … feeling naught but hope, though before those six bodies in your company have hardened into adulthood, several will be cut down by drug-related obliterations. Two will take their own lives. Two will pull time in jail. Who saw it coming? Not you, certainly. … Wedged bare-legged in the banged-up truck with your fellows, you are still immortal, and that coast across the yellow map of the richest country on earth is beckoning to you with the invisible fingers of hashish smoke.

(pp. 13-14)

I can hardly wait.