SOURCE: Bristow, Jennie. “Teenage Confessions.” New Statesman 130, no. 4543 (25 June 2001): 51.

In the following review, Bristow describes Karr's Cherry as “an amusing, warm account of growing up in late 1960s Texas” but comments that the story lacks a compelling plot or unifying element.

Mary Karr tells us, on page 25 of Cherry, that her ambition aged 11 was to write poetry and autobiography—the exact literary path she later followed. When a pre-pubescent decides to make a career in memoir-writing, autobiography clearly ain't what it used to be.

Karr fits well into the great confessional-writing craze of the late 1990s. In the modern memoir, what you have done counts for less than what you feel; there are book contracts out there for all highly strung emotional literates. Ghost-written lives of the already famous have been replaced by diaries of the unknown anorexic or abused child.

To her credit, Karr does not peddle...