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Reviews'Cherry' a Peach of a MemoirBY PAULINE M. MILLARD Associated Press Writer NEW YORK (AP) _ Cherry" (Viking, 276 pages, $24.95) by Mary Karr Five years ago, Mary Karr's childhood memoir "The Liars' Club" became a surprise best seller. Now comes its incredible sequel, "Cherry" (Viking, 276 pages, $24.95). "Cherry" begins as Karr, bored and frustrated with life in her east Texas town of Leechfield in the 1960s, is about to enter junior high school. "Long, long are the hours of each leaden day for girls who've sworn to devote their entire beings to what they call `the life of the mind' but who find themselves unfairly stranded in a town where the proudest sign in the library is one proclaiming every extant issue of Popular Mechanics," she writes. So Karr, like any budding intellectual, tries her hardest to stay enlightened by reading voraciously and attempting to figure out the intricacies of male-female relationships. She has an insatiable crush on a local boy, John Cleary, and between reading poetry and writing some, she attempts to win his, and others', affections. Her efforts are not in vain, as she finally gets him alone for a kissing game of sorts in her mother's makeshift art studio. "I try to reteach myself to breathe normal, but it comes out in halts and jags. I feel grit in the crook of my elbow and creases in my neck and a single dot of sweat bumping down my spine to the small of my back. Then I feel John's hands tremble on my back, and I try to draw him out of that trembling with my own tongue, and it's like we're drinking from each other." Not all her escapades with the opposite sex are so tender. While fending off the advances of Phil, a boy with whom she smokes her first joint, she becomes aware of the strong biological instincts that drive men to women. Drugs are a big part of the adolescent scene, and Karr tells vibrant stories of acid trips and afternoons spent high as a kite and trying to escape her Leechfield-induced boredom and loneliness. These accounts are wonderfully honest, neither preaching nor romanticizing the many "flattened out" Sundays she spent with her surfer friends seeking solace from bongs and pills. "Time lagged mulelike in muddy traces. You had to beat it and cajole it before it plodded forward even a few steps and the earth swung you back to another tarnished sunrise. With drugs you could endure it. Question mark. Maybe." "Cherry" is such a roaring success because Karr's down-home Texan voice coupled with her mastery of language makes the book sound like a budding poet's well-constructed stream of consciousness. It is also peppered with perfectly placed literary allusions, from Keats to Borges and Janis Joplin. The young Karr is wise beyond her years but her endearing brilliance is tangled up in the frustrations of small-town life and the uncertainties of youth. However, she trudges through with the grace and scrappiness of the genius she knows she is, but is just growing into. She explains: "For years you've felt you've only been half-done inside, cobbled together by paper clips, held intact by gum wads and school paste. But something is starting to assemble inside you. You say, I am my Same Self. That's not nothing, is it?" |