Books
The Pits
Mary Karr's new memoir, Cherry, revisits familiar Liars' Club territory—but never turns the narcissism of adolescence into art.
I once wrote a biography, beginning at the beginning, and upon completing the first chapter, fired it off to my agent, who promptly replied that he couldn't sell a book on the strength of someone's childhood. That was long ago and in another century, and only a few years later everything changed and it became possible, even desirable, to write only about childhood, preferably one's own and especially if one had been abused. Sexual abuse was best, but in its stead there was always derivative Dickensian-level suffering—the formula of Angela's Ashes.
In Texas in the nineties the memoir, aping national tendencies, thrived. Marion Winik wrote about her marriage to a gay man felled by AIDS—he was seen around town dying by degrees. Lars Eighner lived in a ditch, and when he wrote about it, people responded. It was something new; Austin literati took him out to dinner. Not since the lives of saints had suffering been so admired. Being interviewed on National Public Radio confirmed the stigmata of significant anguish. Winik even made it onto Oprah, the sweepstakes of superior feeling (this was before the eponymous diva's forays into spiritualism and theosophy). Prior to such outpourings of emotional turmoil, Texas memoirs had tended toward the elegiac: In the most famous, an academic paddled a canoe down a river that he thought was going to be dammed and entertained deep thoughts about philosophy, history, and local weather conditions.
By far the greatest success in the new confessional mode, however, belonged to Mary Karr, the Peck Professor of English at Syracuse University. In the wildly acclaimed and best-selling Liars' Club (1995), Karr told everything there apparently was to tell about her redneck, refinery-trash family adrift in imaginary Leechfield, Texas, a small, smelly, petrochemically poisoned burg somewhere between Beaumont and Port Arthur: Janis Joplin and Jimmy Johnson country. Karr's book hit a nerve; feminists got down with the author's bad self—a sassy, brassy, dirty-talking, hip-leftist, kick-ass NOW sister-in-the-making. Molly Ivins and Ann Richards had paved the way. Everybody was ready to read about How It Was growing up female in good-ol'-boy country. "You go, girl!" rang like a chorus in discussion groups at the big book chains.
The author of a couple of mainly invisible books of poetry, Karr was now highly visible; she was everywhere. In 1996 she came to the annual meeting of the Texas Institute of Letters, held in Houston that year, to accept the Carr P. Collins Prize, for the best nonfiction book of the year. Her mama and sister were in attendance too. They made a good-looking threesome; they might have lunched at the River Oaks Grill that day and spent the afternoon shopping at the Galleria.
In her remarks Karr allowed as how she was already at work on son—or, rather, daughter—of The Liars' Club. It would be called Cherry, she said, which drew an approving twitter, and it was going to be harder to write than the first one because everybody had done so many drugs nobody could remember what had happened. Big salvo of laughter. I recall thinking, "Why don't you just make it up, the way you probably did The Liars' Club, because who can remember all those details from one's childhood?" But I remind myself: What do you know? You haven't been through therapy, a process that is famous for constructing memories of events—always traumatic—that may or may not have happened.
From what Karr said in Houston, I concluded, quite wrongly as it turned out, that Cherry was going to be about the years of her youth after leaving home: the drug scene, Vietnam, the seventies. But that is not the case at all. After a feverish prologue about the angst of Departure, the book returns to the old familiar ground of The Liars' Club, the war-torn landscape of the battlin' Karrs. So what we have is Liars' Club II, sans one of the best characters, the author's dad. He's still around but is no longer indispensable to the little girl he calls Pokey. Puberty intervenes. "I want titties, goddamn it, Daddy. Not some bra," Pokey blurts out in one family council. No wonder Dad drops out, goes fishing.
It was Tolstoy, I believe, who wrote that all functional families are alike, but a dysfunctional family is dysfunctional after its own fashion. Yes, but dysfunctionality is not always interesting, vide any episode of Jenny Jones. The chaotic daily life of the Karrs—a "distressed" family, in Karr's usage—does not need to be revisited but it is, filtered now through the narcissism (understandable but tedious nonetheless) of young Pokey as she coltishly staggers into adolescence, confronting its big issues. Will she grow breasts? Yes. Will she have sex with John Cleary, her first big crush? No. But she does kiss him, and for Karr a kiss is not just a kiss: "Suddenly, I know so much. I understand about waves and cross tides and how jellyfish float and why rivers empty themselves in the Gulf. I understand the undulating movement of the stingray on Sea Hunt and the hard forward muscle of the shark." It's scary to think what Karr could do with a Monica moment in the Oval Office.
When Karr's language about sex isn't faux poetic, it's potty-mouth. At eleven precocious Pokey dreams of a "bona fide boning." Things that break or don't work are invariably called "broke-dick." Mom talks to her daughter about female genitalia and sex acts using vulgarities that are not printable in this magazine. Mother and daughter give each other the finger. At one point Pokey thinks portentously, "Of actual johnsons I had little awareness"—a sentence that, strictly from a stylistic viewpoint, seems ridiculous. Later, imagining the boy she will eventually choose to sleep with, she thinks, "You get the feeling that, unleashed, this tender boy would throw you to the earth and boff you into guacamole." No thanks, I don't feel like Mexican food today.
The book's structure limps along (I started to say in broke-dick stride) from grade to grade. Chapter six begins, "Seventh grade actually starts for me . . . " and chapter seven, "Sometime during the eighth grade . . . ," and then, almost halfway through the book, we read, "Suddenly it's ninth grade," and we want to shout, "Whaddaya mean 'suddenly'?" We're on a Bataan death march here, forced to relive every grade year by year, summer by summer, the molasses-slow progress of Pokey from child to subteen to teen. God, will it ever end? Late in the book a cop tells her to "Shut the f— up," and you think, "Hey, not a bad idea."
Karr's mouthy counterculture, smartass persona thinks far too highly of her "outlaw" self. At one point she writes, ". . . you've been floating along pretty much on your own, especially since Daddy vanished into wherever Daddy goes to, and Lecia took her right-wing turn just as you hooked to the left." Very proud she is of that left turn, presented here as a noble action, a natural outgrowth of her parents' Depression-dyed, yellow-dog Democratic party hatred of Republicans. But her sister, Lecia, targeted here as a right-winger and mocked in The Liars' Club for having voted for Ronald Reagan twice—and triply branded for being married to the "Rice Baron"—is arguably the sanest of the Karrs, the only one to have a lick of sense. It's a relief to read about Lecia, a pleasure to get away from Pokey for a while, just as it is when the interesting, intellectual Meredith, a newcomer to Leechfield High, is introduced late in the book. The Liars' Club is superior to Cherry because it contains well-drawn portraits of Other People: father, mother, grandmother. Hell is not other people; it's adolescent narcissism à la Cherry. A girlfriend who deliberately drops Pokey does so, she says, because Pokey thinks she is smarter than everybody else. Karr recognizes—nay, embraces—the truth of this claim. But she isn't smarter. She's just more "sensitive"—or thinks she is. It's no accident that her favorite poet, early on, is the doyen of teenage rebellion, e. e. cummings, whose radical typography endears him to the young and masks his often sentimental themes: Spring is good, love is good, salesmen are shits, and so on. To give Karr credit, she reads a lot of literature as a youngster and sprinkles her text with allusions to famous works and authors, unnamed so that her audience— composed mainly, one imagines, of college-educated readers—can enjoy little spasms of self-congratulatory pleasure in recognizing cummings, Eliot, Hawthorne, and "The Lottery."
Eighteen months before graduation—there's that school timeline again—she begins to smoke a lot of dope and quickly moves on to trendier modes of achieving chemical nirvana—psylocibin, hallucinogens, but not heroin; like a good girl, she tried that only once. As things begin to grow drug-hazy, Karr introduces the refrain, "Who could have seen it coming?" Well, nearly anybody in 1971. Her sister certainly did. Lecia, right-winger that she is, sees through "Hate"-Ashbury first thing. Only Pokey-Dopey never does. Not even after she spends a night in the Kountze County jail, arrested along with her fellow skinny-dipping, hippie-dippy midnight tokers.
The book has a big epiphany in store for us. Near the end, Karr finds herself in another tight spot, in a backwoods black blues joint where she confronts some down-and-outers she's not prepared to deal with: a huge black woman who exudes menace and a striptease dancer who may in fact be a man and who, observed by Karr in the unspeakably sordid toilet, stabs a hypodermic needle of junk into her/his neck. This walk on the wild side scares the bejeebers out of Karr and sends her back pell-mell to rejoin her cowboy dad, histrionic mom, and Republican sister. Then she goes to see the sage Meredith and delivers the great truth she has learned: "There's no place like home."
Robert Graves, the author of the classic World War I memoir Goodbye to All That, lived to be ninety and wrote 120 books, only one of which, the first, was about himself. He reckoned that his life from the Great War onward had been devoid of anything of autobiographical interest. Of course it was Graves's conviction that memoirs should deal with one's encounters with history, significant public events. That assumption has long since given way to the current state of things, an infantilization of culture in which anybody who survives childhood can make—or make up—a book out of it.
A poet not quoted by Karr, Philip Larkin, summed up the whole matter in the first stanza of "This Be the Verse," a poem he wrote in 1971: "They f— you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you." 
Excerpt from "This Be the Verse" from Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin. Copyright 1988, 1989 by the estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC.
I once wrote a biography, beginning at the beginning, and upon completing the first chapter, fired it off to my agent, who promptly replied that he couldn't sell a book on the strength of someone's childhood. That was long ago and in another century, and only a few years later everything changed and it became possible, even desirable, to write only about childhood, preferably one's own and especially if one had been abused. Sexual abuse was best, but in its stead there was always derivative Dickensian-level suffering—the formula of Angela's Ashes.
In Texas in the nineties the memoir, aping national tendencies, thrived. Marion Winik wrote about her marriage to a gay man felled by AIDS—he was seen around town dying by degrees. Lars Eighner lived in a ditch, and when he wrote about it, people responded. It was something new; Austin literati took him out to dinner. Not since the lives of saints had suffering been so admired. Being interviewed on National Public Radio confirmed the stigmata of significant anguish. Winik even made it onto Oprah, the sweepstakes of superior feeling (this was before the eponymous diva's forays into spiritualism and theosophy). Prior to such outpourings of emotional turmoil, Texas memoirs had tended toward the elegiac: In the most famous, an academic paddled a canoe down a river that he thought was going to be dammed and entertained deep thoughts about philosophy, history, and local weather conditions.
By far the greatest success in the new confessional mode, however, belonged to Mary Karr, the Peck Professor of English at Syracuse University. In the wildly acclaimed and best-selling Liars' Club (1995), Karr told everything there apparently was to tell about her redneck, refinery-trash family adrift in imaginary Leechfield, Texas, a small, smelly, petrochemically poisoned burg somewhere between Beaumont and Port Arthur: Janis Joplin and Jimmy Johnson country. Karr's book hit a nerve; feminists got down with the author's bad self—a sassy, brassy, dirty-talking, hip-leftist, kick-ass NOW sister-in-the-making. Molly Ivins and Ann Richards had paved the way. Everybody was ready to read about How It Was growing up female in good-ol'-boy country. "You go, girl!" rang like a chorus in discussion groups at the big book chains.
The author of a couple of mainly invisible books of poetry, Karr was now highly visible; she was everywhere. In 1996 she came to the annual meeting of the Texas Institute of Letters, held in Houston that year, to accept the Carr P. Collins Prize, for the best nonfiction book of the year. Her mama and sister were in attendance too. They made a good-looking threesome; they might have lunched at the River Oaks Grill that day and spent the afternoon shopping at the Galleria.
In her remarks Karr allowed as how she was already at work on son—or, rather, daughter—of The Liars' Club. It would be called Cherry, she said, which drew an approving twitter, and it was going to be harder to write than the first one because everybody had done so many drugs nobody could remember what had happened. Big salvo of laughter. I recall thinking, "Why don't you just make it up, the way you probably did The Liars' Club, because who can remember all those details from one's childhood?" But I remind myself: What do you know? You haven't been through therapy, a process that is famous for constructing memories of events—always traumatic—that may or may not have happened.
From what Karr said in Houston, I concluded, quite wrongly as it turned out, that Cherry was going to be about the years of her youth after leaving home: the drug scene, Vietnam, the seventies. But that is not the case at all. After a feverish prologue about the angst of Departure, the book returns to the old familiar ground of The Liars' Club, the war-torn landscape of the battlin' Karrs. So what we have is Liars' Club II, sans one of the best characters, the author's dad. He's still around but is no longer indispensable to the little girl he calls Pokey. Puberty intervenes. "I want titties, goddamn it, Daddy. Not some bra," Pokey blurts out in one family council. No wonder Dad drops out, goes fishing.
It was Tolstoy, I believe, who wrote that all functional families are alike, but a dysfunctional family is dysfunctional after its own fashion. Yes, but dysfunctionality is not always interesting, vide any episode of Jenny Jones. The chaotic daily life of the Karrs—a "distressed" family, in Karr's usage—does not need to be revisited but it is, filtered now through the narcissism (understandable but tedious nonetheless) of young Pokey as she coltishly staggers into adolescence, confronting its big issues. Will she grow breasts? Yes. Will she have sex with John Cleary, her first big crush? No. But she does kiss him, and for Karr a kiss is not just a kiss: "Suddenly, I know so much. I understand about waves and cross tides and how jellyfish float and why rivers empty themselves in the Gulf. I understand the undulating movement of the stingray on Sea Hunt and the hard forward muscle of the shark." It's scary to think what Karr could do with a Monica moment in the Oval Office.
When Karr's language about sex isn't faux poetic, it's potty-mouth. At eleven precocious Pokey dreams of a "bona fide boning." Things that break or don't work are invariably called "broke-dick." Mom talks to her daughter about female genitalia and sex acts using vulgarities that are not printable in this magazine. Mother and daughter give each other the finger. At one point Pokey thinks portentously, "Of actual johnsons I had little awareness"—a sentence that, strictly from a stylistic viewpoint, seems ridiculous. Later, imagining the boy she will eventually choose to sleep with, she thinks, "You get the feeling that, unleashed, this tender boy would throw you to the earth and boff you into guacamole." No thanks, I don't feel like Mexican food today.
The book's structure limps along (I started to say in broke-dick stride) from grade to grade. Chapter six begins, "Seventh grade actually starts for me . . . " and chapter seven, "Sometime during the eighth grade . . . ," and then, almost halfway through the book, we read, "Suddenly it's ninth grade," and we want to shout, "Whaddaya mean 'suddenly'?" We're on a Bataan death march here, forced to relive every grade year by year, summer by summer, the molasses-slow progress of Pokey from child to subteen to teen. God, will it ever end? Late in the book a cop tells her to "Shut the f— up," and you think, "Hey, not a bad idea."
Karr's mouthy counterculture, smartass persona thinks far too highly of her "outlaw" self. At one point she writes, ". . . you've been floating along pretty much on your own, especially since Daddy vanished into wherever Daddy goes to, and Lecia took her right-wing turn just as you hooked to the left." Very proud she is of that left turn, presented here as a noble action, a natural outgrowth of her parents' Depression-dyed, yellow-dog Democratic party hatred of Republicans. But her sister, Lecia, targeted here as a right-winger and mocked in The Liars' Club for having voted for Ronald Reagan twice—and triply branded for being married to the "Rice Baron"—is arguably the sanest of the Karrs, the only one to have a lick of sense. It's a relief to read about Lecia, a pleasure to get away from Pokey for a while, just as it is when the interesting, intellectual Meredith, a newcomer to Leechfield High, is introduced late in the book. The Liars' Club is superior to Cherry because it contains well-drawn portraits of Other People: father, mother, grandmother. Hell is not other people; it's adolescent narcissism à la Cherry. A girlfriend who deliberately drops Pokey does so, she says, because Pokey thinks she is smarter than everybody else. Karr recognizes—nay, embraces—the truth of this claim. But she isn't smarter. She's just more "sensitive"—or thinks she is. It's no accident that her favorite poet, early on, is the doyen of teenage rebellion, e. e. cummings, whose radical typography endears him to the young and masks his often sentimental themes: Spring is good, love is good, salesmen are shits, and so on. To give Karr credit, she reads a lot of literature as a youngster and sprinkles her text with allusions to famous works and authors, unnamed so that her audience— composed mainly, one imagines, of college-educated readers—can enjoy little spasms of self-congratulatory pleasure in recognizing cummings, Eliot, Hawthorne, and "The Lottery."
Eighteen months before graduation—there's that school timeline again—she begins to smoke a lot of dope and quickly moves on to trendier modes of achieving chemical nirvana—psylocibin, hallucinogens, but not heroin; like a good girl, she tried that only once. As things begin to grow drug-hazy, Karr introduces the refrain, "Who could have seen it coming?" Well, nearly anybody in 1971. Her sister certainly did. Lecia, right-winger that she is, sees through "Hate"-Ashbury first thing. Only Pokey-Dopey never does. Not even after she spends a night in the Kountze County jail, arrested along with her fellow skinny-dipping, hippie-dippy midnight tokers.
The book has a big epiphany in store for us. Near the end, Karr finds herself in another tight spot, in a backwoods black blues joint where she confronts some down-and-outers she's not prepared to deal with: a huge black woman who exudes menace and a striptease dancer who may in fact be a man and who, observed by Karr in the unspeakably sordid toilet, stabs a hypodermic needle of junk into her/his neck. This walk on the wild side scares the bejeebers out of Karr and sends her back pell-mell to rejoin her cowboy dad, histrionic mom, and Republican sister. Then she goes to see the sage Meredith and delivers the great truth she has learned: "There's no place like home."
Robert Graves, the author of the classic World War I memoir Goodbye to All That, lived to be ninety and wrote 120 books, only one of which, the first, was about himself. He reckoned that his life from the Great War onward had been devoid of anything of autobiographical interest. Of course it was Graves's conviction that memoirs should deal with one's encounters with history, significant public events. That assumption has long since given way to the current state of things, an infantilization of culture in which anybody who survives childhood can make—or make up—a book out of it.
A poet not quoted by Karr, Philip Larkin, summed up the whole matter in the first stanza of "This Be the Verse," a poem he wrote in 1971: "They f— you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you."
Excerpt from "This Be the Verse" from Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin. Copyright 1988, 1989 by the estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC.
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