Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Cherry
    Cherry
    Cherry
    Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

    Cherry

    Written by Mary Karr

    Narrated by Mary Karr

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Mary Karr told the prize-winning tale of her hardscrabble Texas childhood with enough literary verve to spark a renaissance in memoir. The Liar's Club rode the top of The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, and publications ranging from The New Yorker to People picked it as one of the best books of the year. But it left people wondering: How'd that scrappy kid make it outta there? Cherry dares to tell that story. Karr picks up the trail and dashes off into her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom.

    In this long-awaited sequel, we see Karr ultimately trying to run from the thrills and terrors of her sexual awakwening by butting against authority in all its forms. She lands all too often in the principal's office and—in one instance—a jail cell. Looking for a lover or heart's companion who'll make her feel whole, she hooks up with an outrageous band of surfers and heads, wannabe yogis and bona fide geniuses.

    Karr's edgy, brilliant prose careens between hilarity and tragedy, and Cherry takes readers to a place never truly explored—deep inside a girl's stormy, ardent adolescence. Parts will leave you gasping with laughter. But its soaring close proves that from even the smokiest beginnings a solid self can form, one capable of facing down all manner of monsters.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
    Release dateSep 26, 2000
    ISBN9780375417498
    Author

    Mary Karr

    Mary Karr is the author of three award-winning, bestselling memoirs: The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit, as well as The Art of Memoir, also a New York Times bestseller. She received Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships for poetry and is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.

    More audiobooks from Mary Karr

    Related to Cherry

    Related audiobooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      A Feeling Artist

      Dec 15, 2018

      Onstage, I’m thinking about the postman who was so overwhelmed by the amount of mail he had to deliver that he threw it all, and then himself, into the sea. I’m thinking about the agoraphobic grandmother who refused to go outside, even when the fire

      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Lost Bohemians

      Apr 29, 2021

      The Lost Bohemians
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Brandon Taylor

      Dec 8, 2017

      I started the year thinking about plagues and calamities. Like many people, I felt particularly disturbed by the growing gap between what I felt was my lived reality and what was being reported in the news or in print. I read The Plague by Albert Cam

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      More Than an Icon

      Mar 31, 2020

      More Than an Icon
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Edith Wharton Will Teach You Everything You Need to Know About Naming Characters

      Sep 30, 2019

      Her 1905 classic The House of Mirth offers a masterclass in the art of character naming, from heroine Lily Bart to the seriously laughable Mrs. Peniston. The post Edith Wharton Will Teach You Everything You Need to Know About Naming Characters appear

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Black Turtlenecks, Hoop Earrings

      Jun 1, 2021

      Black Turtlenecks, Hoop Earrings
      18 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Transfiguration(s)

      Jun 11, 2019

      Transfiguration(s)
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      I’m a Stained-Glass Guy: The Millions Interviews Kevin Barry

      Aug 30, 2019

      I’m moving more toward subtraction than addition. Which isn’t to say that the next novel won’t be a big and baggy monster. You change all the time. The post I’m a Stained-Glass Guy: The Millions Interviews Kevin Barry appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      CRAFT Therapy

      Feb 17, 2021

      CRAFT Therapy
      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Into the Wild: The Millions Interviews Alden Jones

      Aug 24, 2020

      I’m not saying memoirists should never use marriage as a final plot point. But if we can choose something else, if we resist that expectation, we can ask the culture to consider other ways women come to resolution. The post Into the Wild: The Million

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Speak, Butterfly: Butterflies tied together Vladimir Nabokov’s home, science, and writing.

      Dec 19, 2013

      The life and work of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov referenced many symbols, none so much as the butterfly. Butterflies prompted Nabokov’s travels across the United States, exposing him to the culture and physical environment that he would transform i

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Art of Nonfiction No. 12

      Jun 18, 2024

      The Art of Nonfiction No. 12
      34 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Freud the Essayist

      Jun 1, 2023

      Freud the Essayist
      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Restless Herd

      Apr 14, 2021

      Restless Herd
      21 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Mare Incognitum

      Apr 16, 2021

      Mare Incognitum
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Face the Music

      Dec 8, 2024

      The craft of writing has its own set of commandments. Like, say: Thou shalt show, not tell. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s prose. Thou shalt put thy butt in thy chair and write. And, well, this one, which always struck me as particularly odd amo

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      February Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

      Feb 2, 2022

      February brings new work from Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Haigh, and Marlon James, and moving debuts from Kiare Ladner, Maayan Eitan, and Neda Toloui-Semnani. The post February Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month) appeared first on The Mi

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Shipstead, Ryan, Walker, and More

      May 17, 2022

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from Maggie Shipstead, Eimer Ryan, Sarai Walker, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Millio

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Kellogg’s: The last wholesome fantasy of the middle-school boy.

      Jan 16, 2014

      It wasn’t like this boy to throw a tantrum in the cereal aisle of the supermarket, and it wasn’t like his mother to give in to one, but here they were, for some reason, both making an exception. “Okay,” she said, and threw the box deep into the f

      24 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Go Ahead, Buy a Piano

      Oct 16, 2022

      Go Ahead, Buy a Piano
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Cherry

    3.5/5

    279 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      That summer I fell into reading as into a deep well where no voice could reach me. 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. 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.

      Mary Karr is best known for her memoir of a childhood spent in a rough and tumble Texas town. This is her follow up to that memoir, taking the reader through her teenage years. At the start of the story, Mary is a bookish girl in a place that did not value intelligence, and especially not in women. She eventually makes friends and then discovers both boys and drugs. 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. Her parents are not able to provide a good example or even rules, although they do occasionally come through when needed.

      So you ride home strangely placated. You lack the wits to acknowledge the jail cell of the previous night. If you'd glanced back even once, given that arrest one hard look, a lot of onrushing trouble might have been staved off.
    • 4/5
      Re-read in preparation for the upcoming release of LIT.

      This second in Karr's series of memoirs covers her teen years in Texas, during which she wanders around stoned and poetical. She's about 10 years older than I am, and there is a lot of overlap in our respective memories. Her voice is pure and overcomes the at times awkward choice of second person narration. I do not become quite as immersed in this as I do in her earlier book, but I enjoy it mightily.
    • 2/5
      This memoir was well written but I found the first couple chapters were hard to get my attention. I prefer when a book can catch my mind in the first chapter. I have read her other book and found that one to be much better.
    • 3/5
      describing herself as a wild, smart and bored-to-bits teen in the seventies: a wild, smart and not at all boring book. it may help many a teen understand their parents, actually. good.
    • 4/5
      Though it pales in comparison with Karr's earlier memoir (Liar's Club), still a great read. She really captures the remembered voice of an imaginative girl at various ages. I confess, though, that after setting the book aside for a week 95% of the way through it, I had to force myself through the rest of it.
    • 3/5
      Mary Karr's second midlife memoir covers the years she spent as a teenager in a deary Texas refinery town and details her misadventures with drugs, sex, and the local hippie subculture. Karr's experiences aren't exactly unique, but she's still unflinchingly honest about her wildly dysfunctional family and is in a good position to witness a much-discussed generational shift. "Cherry" perfectly captures the moment when American youth culture tilted into drug-fueled hippie abandon. The prose in "Cherry" is, if anything, even better than the writing in "The Liars Club," and that's no mean feat. Karr gracefully and effortlessly imbues real-life events with novelistic significance, combining a reporter's commitment to detail with a novelist's interest in character. She's even good with topics that most writers misjudge badly: the psychedelic experience and the tricky terrain of female desire.

      The problems with "Cherry" might, sadly enough, originate in the book's subject. Karr was, by her own admission, a rather melodramatic and self-centered teen, and spending almost three hundred pages with the adolescent version of the author can grow tiresome. As her drug use grows more extreme towards the end of the book, you can sense a real psychic chasm open beneath her and I'm not sure that it gets fully resolved by the book's end. Like "The Bell Jar," "Cherry" is suffused with a sense of dread and confusion so strong that it might be contagious. One gets the sense that Karr's extremely lucky to be both alive and sane. She's a good writer, though, and, despite its problems, I'm glad that she lived long enough to produce this book.
    • 3/5
      As my first trip into Mary Carr's world, I was entranced and inspired. I can't wait to write my own memoir!

      Her prose was loaded and lush with wonderful metaphors and invoked her feelings, especially during that one chapter at Effie's. I was tripped the hell out!

      She did lose me during the acid trip chapters but the first two thirds of the book had me hooked.

      She's a great writer; I can't front. I only hope to be as awesome as she is.
    • 5/5
      I'm reading this now (just finished it). It's wonderful! Straight talk from an attractive and exasperating young woman-- the cultural references are spot on. Her memories of the trials-- the ones she experienced, and the ones she caused-- and cluelessness of adolescence are bravely and truthfully presented. Mary Karr is a delight to read.
    • 3/5
      I didn't like this nearly as much as Liar's Club. Although she maintains her wonderful style of writing, the book was disappointing and has none of the charm of her earlier work.
    • 3/5
      An honest, and interesting female memoir.