under Reviving Ophelia, God help me,' recalls Karr. So what was the problem? 'It was #2 forever. General readers loved the book, too, flocking to Karr's readings and buying enough copies to keep The Liars' Club on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. Karr's account of her childhood in Port Arthur, Tex., buffeted by the stormy interactions of her hard-drinking parents, was the critical hit of the season, praised by reviewers for its gallows humor, hard-won compassion, earthy yet elegant prose, and for a gift for storytelling the author had obviously inherited from her yarn-spinning daddy. If you'd glanced back even once, given that arrest one hard look, a lot of onrushing trouble might have been staved off.Mary Karr says she had one complaint when The Liars' Club was published in 1995. You lack the wits to acknowledge the jail cell of the previous night. Her parents are not able to provide a good example or even rules, although they do occasionally come through when needed. It was the seventies and she quickly fell in with a group of surfer boys and their hangers-on, which suited her contrarian nature and need to push back against the often pointless authoritarianism of her high school. She eventually makes friends and then discovers both boys and drugs. At the start of the story, Mary is a bookish girl in a place that did not value intelligence, and especially not in women. This is her follow up to that memoir, taking the reader through her teenage years. Mary Karr is best known for her memoir of a childhood spent in a rough and tumble Texas town. I read the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and fancied myself running away to Africa to find just such an ape man to swing me from vine to vine. There was a poem about a goat-footed balloon man I recited everyday like a spell, and another about somebody stealing somebody else's plums and saying he was sorry but not really meaning it. That summer I fell into reading as into a deep well where no voice could reach me.

Cherry by mary karr