Poet and memoirist Mary Karr.

DATE October 2, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Author Mary Karr discusses her latest memoir "Cherry"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Mary Karr, is the author of one of the most highly regarded
memoirs
of the past decade, "The Liar's Club." New York Times book critic Michiko
Kakutani described it one of her generation's most eloquent, heart-grabbing
memoirs, a pitch-perfect account of her childhood in a hard scrabble east
Texas town. Dwight Garner described "The Liar's Club" as one of the best
books ever written about growing up female--or growing up, period--in
America.
It wasn't just the critics who loved the book. It was on the best-seller
list
for over a year.

Karr's now in her mid-40s, and is a professor at Syracuse University. She
had
a new memoir called "Cherry," about her early teen years, dealing with
sexuality, self-consciousness, conflicts with parents and teachers and her
ongoing effort to figure out who she really is and wants to be. One think
she's certain of, she has to escape her hometown. The book opens with her
waiting for her friends who are picking her up and driving to California.

Let's start with a reading.

Professor MARY KARR (Author, "Cherry"): (Reading) `No road offers more
mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the
first time you mount if of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own
coffee tin of wrinkled-up dollars, bills you've saved and scrounged for,
worked the all-night switchboard for, missed The Rolling Stones for, sold
fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic
baggies
for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you've done everything you
can
think to scrounge money, save selling your spanking young self.

`It's best if you set out on this quest with friends equally young because
then all of you will be carried through several days of sleepless drive and
infrequent pee stops across massive scorched desert by a collective,
hallucinogenic insomnia that turns the gigantic cacti into, alternately,
first, a guitar-toting mystic and then a phantom hitchhiker and, finally,
into
a spangled matador cutting veronicas above the sand floor. You will be
carried past these metaphorical monsters by the fire and wonder of your
collective yearning toward your chosen spot: the black dot on the map at
which your young, muscled bodies will be fired. In this case: Los
Angeles.'

GROSS: Mary Karr, how would you describe the part of your life covered in
this new memoir "Cherry"?

Prof. KARR: It's an age when I started assembling myself, I think.
I--before that, everything I was I--was inherited. That tends to be true, I
think, for all of us. You know, you're born and they stamp a name on you,
and
you're known in your community in some relation to your family, and you're
known inside your family in some specific spot. You're the littlest or the
loudest or the roughest. And I think we hit age 11 or 12 and we start
choosing who we're going to be, inventing ourselves.

GROSS: Yeah. And you write very eloquently about that, and about how when
you start changing yourself, other people think, well, maybe you're being
phony. You talk about trying to explain that your old self had been
falsified, a mere mask tacked over this real self, which you only now have
the
guts to reveal.

Prof. KARR: That's the feeling I had, I think. It's funny, I--there's a
great line from George Orwell: `You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit
it.'

GROSS: Yeah.

Prof. KARR: And I think it's one of those ages when, yeah, you start trying
selves on. You're going to be a hippie or you're going to be a radical or
you're going to be a rah-rah girl or you're going to be somebody's
girlfriend.
You're sort of strapping on identities to see who you can sell them to.

GROSS: You write that in your town the town was more tolerant of affliction
and physical handicap than social wrongness. Were you or your family
considered socially wrong?

Prof. KARR: I think that's an understatement for what my family was
considered. I mean, I've often said a dysfunctional family is a family with
more than one person in it. So--you know, my mother was married seven
times,
and this was--I was born in 1955. So this was the sort of anesthetized
'50s.
And I grew up in a kind of working-class, swampy backwater in east Texas.
And
my mother--who had also been to art school it also turned out--had married
seven times, twice to my father. And she guzzled a lot of vodka, and my
father was a pretty hard hitter. So, yeah--I mean, I think my family stood
out.

GROSS: Some of your mother's eccentricities were probably really positive
in
your life. She was a painter. She liked art. She liked to read.

Prof. KARR: My mother was one of those women who had a big tower of books
by
her bed. And this was in a town that didn't have a bookstore, you know.
The
only bookstore in my town sold those little Day-Glo icons that you set on
your
dashboard. In fact, I don't even remember if they sold books although it
was
called a bookstore. So, yeah. And reading saved my life, I think. Poetry
saved my life. And my mother was an intellectual. I mean, she believed in
the life of the mind. She would drive us to see opera or to see a play if
we
could afford it and all get loose from our various obligations. So, yeah--I
mean, that was rare. And she was also very tolerant of--she was tolerant of
change and of my--and the changes I went through at this age in a way, you
know, a lot of moms aren't.

GROSS: You said poetry was one of the things that you feel saved your life.
What--can you recite a few lines from memory of one of the poems that you
particularly loved when you were young?

Prof. KARR: Oh, yeah, e.e. cummings' "In Just-Spring." `And the world is
mud-luscious and the little lame balloon man whistles far and we and Eddie
and
Bill came running and it sprang and the world is a puddle wonderful.'

You know, I could do Shakespeare. I mean, you could sort of whap me upside
the head. `A comfort no man speak. Let's talk of graves, of worms and
epitaphs. Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the
bosom
of the Earth. For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell stories
of
the deaths of kings, how some have been deposed, some murdered by their
wives,
some sleeping killed. All murdered. For within the crown which browns the
hollow temples of the king sleeps death, his court.' I mean, it doesn't get
any better than that.

GROSS: Mary Karr is my guest.

As your new--as the title of your new memoir "Cherry" implies, a lot of your
new memoir is about teen-age sexuality and those early sexual awakenings,
and
you're very eloquent about that. Your mother, who as a teacher had seen a
lot
of pregnant teen-agers, put you on the pill at about age 15 just in case.

Prof. KARR: Yes.

GROSS: Did that encourage you to be sexual earlier than you might otherwise
have been?

Prof. KARR: Absolutely it did. Absolutely. I mean, I think--again, I
think
she was trying to be progressive and certainly trying to prevent my getting
knocked up, which was a common occurrence in the town I grew up in. I mean,
I
had friends who were pregnant and married at 14. So, yeah. But at the
time,
I wasn't even dating. You know, I was this kind of skinny, you know, still
a
kind of borderline tomboy trying--I was a recovering tomboy, I guess. And,
yeah, so obviously.

I mean, the amazing thing about this book--everybody thinks the title
"Cherry"
is ironic. And I think even despite that, you know, despite my mother's
sexual openness--again, which sort of nudged me in a way to be sexual long
before I was prepared to--it's a book about discovering an innocence that I
didn't believe I had. It's in no way ironic.

GROSS: Well, you write that the way people talked about being deflowered it
was as if something you owned was stolen, something of worth ruined. Now
you
had been raped at the age of seven. Did you feel like you had already lost
that thing, anyways; that part of you was already ruined?

Prof. KARR: Well, exactly. And again, I mean--you know. So I think when I
first started writing the book, I was thinking of it as a book about the
loss
of innocence. And again, it became for me a kind of rediscovery of an
innocence I didn't know I had and an innocence, given my reckless behavior,
I
probably didn't deserve--even aside from what was inflicted on me as a
child,
what I volunteered for, you know, in my teens.

So, yeah. I mean, I think initially when I started writing the book I
believed--I threw away about 500 pages because they were all about this kind
of--this steamy sexuality, which really I was superimposing the libidinal
feelings of a 40-year-old woman onto myself at 12. And I kept throwing them
out because the pages seemed so perverted, and they were perverted. And
they
also happened not to be true. And at a certain point, I sort of clicked
that,
`Oh, I remember, you know. I wanted this guy to skate over to me with a
long-stemmed red rose.' All my fantasies and all the imagery that I found
so
thrilling at that time had--those images were all very courtly, and the--the
scenes I've been told are very racy are entirely chaste.

GROSS: Well, you talked about all the page about early sexuality that you
took out. Let's hear a passage that you wrote and kept in. And this is
about
the difference between what you were feeling as someone in your early teens
with a boy who's about four years older than you are. I think you're around
15; he's around 19 in this.

Prof. KARR: Yes.

GROSS: And you know that you're experiencing this little sexual interaction
very differently.

Prof. KARR: (Reading) `It's either spectacularly sad or spectacularly
innocent, that while your solar plexus churns and all your body rushes with
desire you don't long to unzip Phil's pants or otherwise dismantle his
clothing. Nor do you even get so far in fantasy as to actually envision
sex,
the brute carnality and mechanics of which would ruin all the verdant, soft,
focused power of his kisses. It would slip you both from eternal time into
the time of furrow and field, entering and leaving, start and, "No, please
God, finish."'

GROSS: What were some of the other differences, in retrospect, you feel
that
you and the boys you were with experiencing differently about early
sexuality?

Prof. KARR: Well, I think the culture doesn't have a language for girls
being sexual at this age. There's not much language for women being sexual,
but there is some. But I think it's just part of common parlance. I mean,
there's no word like `chubby' that's--there's no word comparable to the word
`chubby' for a girl to describe arousal that's so childlike in a way and
kind
of innocent and silly. You know, I think of my son teasing his friends,
`Boy,
I bet you take really long showers.' Or my nephew came to visit me once
with
a locked briefcase and--I think he was about 14 and we were flying up from
Texas. And I said, `So what's in there, your Playboys?' And he turned to
me
very sharply and said, `You looked.'

And, again, it wasn't--you know, I can't think of anything comparable. And,
again, I think that's partly because the ways we feel don't ding the
cultural
bell as erotic. They aren't so carnal. I didn't have--I wasn't hard-wired
to
get the deed done, perhaps, in the way a 17-year-old boy might have been.

GROSS: You write in the book about how after, you know, smooching with a
boy,
the next morning you'd look in the mirror and you'd think, you know, `What
was
I thinking?,' you know. Looking in the mirror, you'd think, `I'm not that
person I thought I was.'

Prof. KARR: Yeah, I think I used the phrase, you know, that there was some
schism between that kind of wild luxury of these kisses and this kind of,
you
know, scabby-looking girl, you know, who still looks partly like a child.
Yeah, I went on a date with some guy who just a guy, who just a kind of
regular fella, you know, nice. I had no particular passion for him, and
wound up kissing him. And the feelings that prompted at the time were so
out
of line with my relationship with this guy. I mean, I guess it's a common
enough occurrence, isn't it? But yeah, I felt that--you know, I felt sort
of
locked off from that person, like, `Who is that? What was that?' And I
avoided this boy like the plague because I was so embarrassed by having, you
know, made out with him at the drive-in like this. I found it very
embarrassing.

GROSS: Oh, and I liked this, too. Once before being with a boy, you said
you
wanted to take a shower and brush your teeth. But being concerned with
hygiene at such an instant would sound so uncool.

Prof. KARR: Right.

GROSS: And you also aren't sure that cleaning up would help. It's the
whole
blunt corporeal exchange that's eating away at you.

Prof. KARR: It really is. I mean, you know, it's--again, I felt like with
this particular boy, who was my first lover--who was really a very sweet boy
and smart and kind. But as soon as we'd slept together, I had that sense
of,
`Oh, my God.' Everything we'd been doing before was sort of what I liked,
was
sort of kissing and staring into each other's eyes for hours on end. And I
could see for him that had all been this kind of, you know, erotic cheese
and
crackers, that that was sort of beside the point. And once you sort of
crossed over that line, his experience was just very different than mine
was.
And yet, I had envisioned him as my soul mate, this boy who understood
everything about me, and we were so similar and it was so great that we'd
found each other so young because we were going to have this fabulous life
together. I mean, I was 15 years old. Yeah. And it--you know. And to
suddenly see in this guy's face that, in fact, you know, he's hard-wired to
get the deed done, that our experiences were so different.

GROSS: My guest is Mary Karr. Her new memoir is called "Cherry." We'll
talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Mary Karr is my guest, and her new memoir "Cherry" is a follow-up to
her first memoir, the best-selling book "The Liar's Club."

Well, what were some of the books, movies, TV shows, music that formed your
romantic fantasies in your early teens?

Prof. KARR: Oh, it's funny. I mean, I think of that Nick Hornby novel
"High
Fidelity," you know, about how you're sort of shaped by pop music in this
awful way. Books--oh, gosh. "Anna Karenina" was, I think, my favorite
novel.
It's still one of my favorite novels, which is this romantic tragedy in
which
a woman betrays her husband. And then because of the nature of the
betrayal,
you know, she winds up a suicide. I mean, that couldn't be more operatic or
unfortunate in terms of where a woman's libido is going to lead her.

Songs--pop songs. I'm trying to think. Well, I--you know, I listened to
The
Beatles, I listened to Joni Mitchell. I also listened to a lot of blues. I
mean, I grew up in a place--I grew up not far from where Janis Joplin was
born. And so, you know, the idea that you were going to suffer at the hands
of some man was sort of built into the deal.

GROSS: You mentioned "Anna Karenina" and suicide. You tried suicide when
you
were in your teens. You swallowed a whole bunch of Anacins. What provoked
that?

Prof. KARR: It's funny. I don't think of it as `trying suicide' so much
as--it felt to me like a gesture, in retrospect. It didn't feel quite as
dramatic as I meant it to be. And in fact, I sort of intended the scene in
the book to be comical because I sort of put on my black dress and laid down
and crossed my hands over my chest. And my neighbors were yelling at each
other outside the window and I thought, `You know, Socrates didn't have to
deal with this,' you know. He had Crido(ph) saying, `Please, Master, tell
us
something else.' And my attempt with a handful of Anacin sort of lacked
that
drama or seriousness. You know, my home was unstable and I was depressed.
Yeah, I was depressed. I mean, whether that was hormonally prompted or
endemic to my nature or--certainly, you know, it's a result of having a very
chaotic household.

GROSS: When you realized that your suicide wasn't going to have the drama
of
Socrates and the gravity of Socrates, did that kind of ruin the romance of
suicide and make it something not worth messing around with again?

Prof. KARR: I never, after that, turned a hand to myself. I never--now
when
I'm upset, I sometimes consider homicide. But it stopped seeming like a
solution even though--like, even though the poetry of darkness or dark
sensibility or depression, you know, Keats' "Ode to Melancholy"--`I've been
half in love with easeful death,' you know. And certainly, there's a lot of
great art that surrounds that kind of despair. I just wrote an introduction
to "The Wasteland" for the Modern Library. I mean, that's a classic example
of someone creating a kind of psychic landscape where suicide might, indeed,
be a logical extension.

But yeah, I think--it seems to me now really cowardly. And my mother had
threatened suicide. She never really did anything about it, but frequently,
I
think when she was overwhelmed, that was her solution. So, yeah. I
just--it
ceased to be an answer to anything and became a kind of cowardly act.

GROSS: You know, actually, you wrote a poem about suicide that's published
in
a recent collection of poems. And I'd like you to read that poem for us.
And
this is in a book called "Viper Rum," and the poem is called "Incant Against
Suicide."

Prof. KARR: Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I should mention that I've--I got a
letter from a psychiatrist in New York saying that he's given this poem to
so
many of his patients. I was very moved by that. I mean, it's nice if you
can
help.

(Reading) `Incant Against Suicide. Buy neither gun nor blue-edged blade.
Avoid green rope, high windows, rat poison, cobra pits and the long,
vanishing
point of train tracks that draw you to horizon's razor. Only this way will
another day refine you. Natural death's no oxymoron. Your head's a bad
neighborhood. Don't go there alone, even if you have to stop strangers to
ask
the way and even if spiders fall from your open mouth. This talks their
only
exit. How else would their scramble from your skull escape? You must make
room, first, that the holy spirits might enter. Empty yourself of self,
then
kneel down to listen.'

GROSS: I like that poem a lot.

Prof. KARR: Thank you.

GROSS: Especially, `Your head's a bad neighborhood. Don't go there alone.'

Prof. KARR: Exactly.

GROSS: It's very funny.

Prof. KARR: You know, I still have that. I mean, I--you know, I don't get
that kind of black depression I describe in my book. But you know, my head
will talk to me of a given day. It will start prattling at me. But I'm
better at turning the volume down on it.

GROSS: How do you do that?

Prof. KARR: Physical exercise, which generates endorphins. But sort of the
way I say in the poem. I mean, I talk to people. If I'm feeling bad, I
have
a number of friends. And I'm not above going to see a mental health
professional. I'm happy to get professional help, get a little help if
it'll
shut my head up. I haven't been in therapy--I haven't been in long-term
therapy for more than a decade. But you know, it's the way all of us heal
ourselves as you find people to love you, you know, people who will buy your
act. And, you know, to have someone sitting across from you with a caring
expression on your face when you're talking about your pain is comforting.
I
also go to church. I mean, I converted to Catholicism. So I pray.

GROSS: Mary Karr's new memoir "Cherry" is a follow-up to her best-seller,
"The Liar's Club." She'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Credits)

GROSS: This is NPR, National Public Radio.

Coming up: writing memoirs. We continue our conversation with Mary Karr,
author of the best-selling memoir "The Liar's Club," and the new follow-up,
"Cherry." And TV critic David Bianculli previews the new fall lineup.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Mary Karr. Her new
memoir "Cherry" is the follow-up to her best-selling memoir "The Liar's
Club."
Both books are about growing up in a small town in east Texas. The new
book,
"Cherry," covers her early teens years. When we left off, we were talking
about dealing with depression, and Karr mentioned that she converted to
Catholicism.

When did you convert?

Prof. KARR: '97.

GROSS: How come?

Prof. KARR: My son came into my room--he was about five years old--one
Sunday morning and he said, `I want to go to church.' And I wanted to read
The New York Times, so I said, `Why?' And he said, `I want to see if God's
there.' And I thought, `Oh.' You know, I didn't like soccer either, but I
went and stood out on the frozen field, you know, and watched him run up and
down.

So we did this thing we called God-O-Rama, where anybody we knew who had a
spiritual practice of any kind, we went with them. So we went to a number
of
Jewish temples, including conservative temples and small, private groups.
We
went to Baptist churches, Episcopal, Unitarian. I--we even did a Buddhist
Zendo. We never made it to a mosque, but I found myself in a Catholic
church
that a friend of mine, actually--Tobias Wolff--invited me to. And I was
very
moved. And if you told me I would join the Catholic Church, I just would
have
laughed myself sick. And I'm sure I'm not the pope's favorite Catholic. I
mean, let me just put it that way. But I go to church every Sunday, and I
pray every day. I think--it puts me in perspective, I think. It puts my
difficulties in their right size.

GROSS: Now your first memoir, "The Liar's Club," was a best-seller. It was
also, you know, important in popularizing the memoir. Why did you first
decide to write a memoir?

Prof. KARR: It's a form that always interested me. I write in this
book--the only journal I have from ever, really--I never really kept a
journal. But the only journal I have from childhood in that I write, `When
I
grow up, I want to write half-poetry and half-autobiography.' So I don't
even
remember an autobiography I read as a child. This was 1965, I think. I
would
have been 10, 10 or 11.

So the form always interested me. I started teaching classes, and when I
was
teaching composition and rhetoric in the academic ghetto around Boston, I
often taught courses in family memoir. I think I wanted to know how people
lived their lives. I also was a big fan--and still am a big fan of
biography,
and at time, literary biography. So I had tried to write this book--well, I
had tried to "Liar's Club" as a novel, and when I did the character who was
me, behaved way better in fiction than I ever had in fact. You know, she
was
beautiful and noble and wise. She did volunteer work at the nursing home.
I mean, for me, fiction would have been an opportunity to correct.

And I also--also, I was endowed with these amazing characters. So I don't
know. I think it's a psychological tilt. You know, why does Philip Roth
write books that, you know, he basically admits are autobiographical and yet
they're labeled fiction, you know. I don't know. I think it must be the
writer's psychological position.

GROSS: Now I know you kept a diary as a girl. Did a lot of your memoir
come
from memories revived by that diary?

Prof. KARR: Virtually none of it. Actually, that's not true. I mean, what
I discovered from that--it was only--it's less than one volume. I mean,
it's
not very thorough. I was a lazy kid, I think, intellectually. And so
I--you
know, I'd keep it for a few days or a week, and then I'd kind of stop and
get
disinterested. But for instance, you know, I think we remember ourselves in
convenient packages. And I like to remember myself as very smart as this
age,
you know. And I had been a very smart little girl. I think I was
precocious.
I read very early, at age two and a half. And there was some evidence that
I
was smarter than the average, you know, seven- or eight-year-old.

But when I read the poems I had written in 1965, it was very clear that even
though I occasionally had to sense to read E.E. Cummings or Shakespeare, I,
in fact, wasn't very smart, you know. I was writing love poems to the star
of
"Branded," you know. And drawing pictures of--from "Song of Bernadette,"
you
know, drawing pictures of Jesus. So I real--you know, I think, again, I
very
conveniently remembered myself as being this great intellect. And in fact,
you know, I was just kind of an average kid in terms of intelligence,
probably. I mean, I think I was more interested in reading because, I
think,
my family was then.

GROSS: Yeah. I once had the nerve to go back to, like, a diary from sixth
grade, or something. And it was all, basically, who I sat next to in class
that day and what I had taken for lunch. And I think it wouldn't have
occurred to me then to write down things that I was actually feeling that
were
complicated or what was going on in my personal life or my family life
beyond
who I had a crush on that day. I think it really wouldn't have occurred to
me.

Prof. KARR: Yeah. I mean, it's too humiliating. Believe me, it doesn't
get
any easier. It doesn't get any easier when you're a grown-up. It's equally
humiliating. I sort of--yeah. I mean, how--you know, I say--yeah. I think
it's inconvenient to write down the ways we suffer. I think that's true.

GROSS: Do you keep a journal now?

Prof. KARR: Oh, goodness, no. I don't have time. And I also lead a pretty
banal life. I mean, in many ways I'm a soccer mom, you know. I live in
Syracuse. I teach at Syracuse University. And I have a son--I'm a single
mom, although my ex-husband is great and we co-parent really well, and he's
very involved in raising our son. So I mean, I lead a really--I sort of
live
in this Country Time Lemonade commercial is the way it looks. All the
things
that everybody in the '50s were trying to escape I'm trying to re-create,
you
know, in the year 2000. And, you know, this sort of--I literally--I have a
picket fence, you know. I mean, the whole shooting match, you know. And I
have--I stand out on the soccer field and watch kids run up and down...

GROSS: Uh-huh.

Prof. KARR: ...and shoot hoops in my driveway when my son comes home from
school.

GROSS: What about memory, though? You know, your two books, outside of
your
poetry books, have been memoirs, which requires remembering. And I don't
know
if you experienced this, but sometimes memories really start to disappear
and
you're able to remember less and less, and you trust less and less the
things
you are able to remember. So isn't there the temptation to keep a journal
just to kind of preserve what it is that you've experienced and know that
you
experienced it?

Prof. KARR: Well, I mean, if I were going to do that, I'd strap a video
camera to my head. You know, I mean, for me a memoir is an act of--I mean,
I
mean that seriously in a way. For me, memoir is an act of memory and not an
act of history. So, I mean, it's remembered experience; it's not lived
experience. So, you know, there are all kinds of theories about ways we
remember and I have no doubt that my memory is as--I do have a better
long-term memory than most people, you know, that I basically wrote this
book
and I gave it to all my friends. And no one said, `That didn't happen,' or,
`That didn't happen that way.' People told me things I didn't remember, or
they augmented events or they told me how they felt, in ways that I had no
way
to know.

But, you know, it's a corrupt form. You know, memory informs imagination,
and
imagination informs memory. So when people ask me how I remember all this
stuff, I always say, `Well, obviously, I don't; I just think I do,' which I
think is true.

GROSS: You know, one lives through life trying to keep certain unpleasant
things kind of secret from other people. It's certainly not the first thing
that you tell them. I mean, you don't meet somebody and say, `By the
way--and
I was abused when I was seven,' you know? But when you've written a memoir,
before people even meet you in person, they may have read your book and
found
out all these, you know, really private, personal things that you, you know,
probably kept secret from most people for most of your life. So I'm
wondering
if that's changed your interactions with people who you're meeting now
because
if they've read your work, they know so many things.

Prof. KARR: It's funny. I have a great switch that's I've thrown. You
know,
I've never re-read "The Liar's Club" and wouldn't, you know? I managed to
not
remember or not know that people know those things. I think people are
actually kinder to me in some way, or they feel they know me when they meet
me. And so I think in some ways people are much more open with me, perhaps,
then they would have been. They feel as if I've let them in on something
which I guess I have, even though I manage to deny that.

And like most writers, I'm never interested really in talking about
something
I've already written. Once it's written, I'm kind of done. So if someone
comes up to me and says, `Oh, you know, that part where your mother has a
psychotic break in "Liar's Club" was so important to me,' I usually say
something like, you know, `Thank you very much. Why do you think you were
so
interested in that? Did you have anything like that in your family?'

And, you know, I'm not--Martin Amis has a great line I think he stole from
Ian
McEwan which is, `You go on the road or you start talking about a book
you've
already written and you become an employee of your former self.'

GROSS: That's great.

Prof. KARR: Isn't that good?

GROSS: Yeah.

Prof. KARR: And so my interest in talking about--I would still talk about
those events intimately if they came up. If they came up in my psyche with
people I'm close to, but otherwise, I mostly just don't talk about it.

GROSS: My guest is Mary Karr. Her new memoir is called "Cherry." We'll
talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Mary Karr. Her new memoir, "Cherry," is a fallow-up to
her best-seller "The Liar's Club."

When was it in your life, would you say, that you knew you wanted to write?

Prof. KARR: When I was five. We had this big edition of Riverside
Shakespeare. My sister still has it. You know, I sort of am trying to
bully
it away from her, but that I actually used it as a booster seat when I was a
little kid. And so my mother was always so interested and excited if I
recited poetry to her. She would just sit with her chin in her hands and
look
enthralled, which when you're a kid and you have a mother who's kind of
eccentric and whose attention is a little bit hard to get, you know, it
causes
you to be interested in that stuff. So when I was five years old if you
asked
me what I wanted to do, I would have said I wanted to be a poet. And that
basically never changed.

There was a brief time when I used to say I wanted to be a journalist--my
mother had written for a newspaper and I always liked newsrooms, to walk in
at
that time. You know, there were the typewriters that clacked and all that.
I
thought it was really exciting. But basically I never wrote any journalism,
so, you know, it was always poetry, so...

GROSS: I have a kind of technical question about your memoir. Most of it
is
written in first-person past tense--you telling the story about an earlier
part your life--but the first chapter is written in the second person. It's
written in the you as if, you know, you're waiting for the car to come;
you're
waiting to leave your hometown. Why did you write in the you in that first
chapter?

Prof. KARR: Well, it's funny because I actually do. I take that up again
later in the last section. I also go to second-person present tense;
whereas
in the prologue, I think it's second-person past tense, which has more
elegiac
feeling to it. And I start in first-person past and then I do first-person
present. I sort of was trying to change the voice slightly because I did
have
a sense of myself changing.

I had a sense of estrangement from myself in high school, and I don't know
if
it was drug-induced or if it had to do with my hormonal levels or if I was
depressed, but I thought to write in the first-person just didn't convey
that
sort of estrangement from myself that I had, that kind of abstracted way the
world was coming at me.

Again, I think I didn't much have a self; I was kind of assembling this
self.
And, you know, when I was a kid, even though it was a kind of a self that
had
been donated to me in some ways by genetics in my family situation, I at
least
was responding to things with some natural impetus, out of some natural
core,
I think, and I was much more self conscious at this age and was always kind
of
looking at myself, you know? I mean, you know, the hours I spent worrying
about my pores is just astonishing.

GROSS: You have a teen-age son now, yes?

Prof. KARR: He just turned 14. Yeah.

GROSS: Right. OK. And that's part of the age that's covered in your
memoir.
Do you want your teen-age son to read your memoir in the hopes, perhaps,
that
it would help him understand something about girls' sexuality or do you
think
if he read the memoir, he'd be learning more than he needs to know about his
mother?

Prof. KARR: The latter. I mean, obviously, I have no investment in his
reading in either of the books. And he hasn't read either. And so no--and
he
just turned 14. I don't think he needs to know anything about girls'
sexuality. I'm his mom; you know, that's my little bitty baby boy.

But we actually had some interesting conversations about it. He came home a
couple of years ago and burst in the door and said, `I can read any memoir I
want for English.' And I thought, `This is my big moment.' And he said,
`And
I'm going to read "This Boy's Life."

GROSS: Oh, great. That's a great book by Tobias Wolff who's a friend of
yours.

Prof. KARR: He's a friend of mine. He's also Deb's(ph) godfather. And so
I
sort of breathed a sign of relief. But this summer he said to me--I think
it
was the New Yorker excerpted "Cherry" and I think it was when the excerpt
came
out and he looked at the picture but he didn't read it. And he said, `You
know, Mom, I don't think I'm ready to read either of these books.' And I
said, `You know, I have no vested interest in your reading either one of
them.
I mean, if you ever want to talk to me about anything that's in them, I can
do
that. I'm happy to do that,' but, you know, he's a kid. He wants to know
me
in my pajamas sort of, not through--I intend this book to be a work of art,
and I don't think he wants to know me as an artist; he wants to know
something
sort of more fundamental, something that's gonna actually get him some
French
toast in the morning.

But I remember Toby Wolff's sons didn't read "This Boy's Life" until I think
he made it a contingency of their seeing the movie. So I think that's kind
of
common for the sons and daughters of writers possibly. I don't know. I
mean,
I remember meeting Dimitri Nabokov and hearing him talk about his father's
work and obviously I should be so lucky as to write so well or to have a son
so devoted to my writing.

GROSS: Well, Mary Karr, I thank you so much for talking with us.

Prof. KARR: Thanks for having me.

GROSS: Mary Karr's new memoir "Cherry" is a fallow-up to her best-seller
"The
Liar's Club."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Profile: Carl Sigman dies at the age of 91; Abbey Lincoln sings
Sigman's "Crazy He Calls Me"
TERRY GROSS, host:

The lyricist Carl Sigman died last week at the age of 91. He wrote the
lyrics to Ellington's song "All Too Soon" and to Tadd Dameron's "If You
Could
See Me Now." He also wrote the lyrics to "Edd Tide," "Enjoy Yourself,"
"Pennsylvania 6-5000," "It's All In The Game," and this song, "Crazy He
Calls
Me." Here's Abbey Lincoln's recording.

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. ABBEY LINCOLN: (Singing) I say I'll move the mountains and I'll move
the
mountains if he wants them out of the way. Crazy he calls me; sure I'm
crazy,
crazy in love I'd say. I say I'll go through fire and I'll go through fire
as he wants it, so will it be. Crazy he calls me. Sure I'm crazy, crazy in
love, you see. Like the wind that shakes the bow; he moves me with a smile.
The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.
I
say I'll care forever and I mean forever if I have to hold up the sky.
Crazy
he calls me. Sure I'm crazy, crazy in love am I.

GROSS: Coming up, TV critic David Bianculli previews the new season which
begins today. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: New season shows for television
TERRY GROSS, host:

The fall 2000 TV season begins officially today, a few weeks later than
usual
because of the Olympics. TV critic David Bianculli says the delay wasn't a
very good thing and that most of the new shows this season aren't that good
either.

DAVID BIANCULLI reporting:

There's an annoying media word called buzz which basically talks about what
everybody is talking about. On TV a year ago, ABC's "Who Wants To Be A
Millionaire" had buzz; this summer the CBS series "Survivor" definitely had
buzz. But the Olympics didn't start or end with buzz and the new fall TV
season which begins tonight is almost buzzless.

This year it's for two reasons. One reason is the late start. Just like
the
Olympics messed things up by starting after Labor Day when people were
preoccupied with school and kids and pro baseball and football, TV isn't
doing
itself any favors by starting in October.

The idea of launching a fall season is to get people thinking about TV
again,
to welcome back their favorite old shows, to sample a few new ones and maybe
to add some of those to their weekly viewing lists. This works when there's
momentum, when the networks roll out their fall schedules at about the same
time and when there's about a month for viewers to check out the new stuff
before getting distracted.

But this year WB and UPN dribbled out a few shows early, and some of the new
and returning shows this season won't appear until November or even later.
By
waiting until October to start, the rest of the networks are launching their
new shows at a time when the distractions are already here. We have four
political debates in prime time this month and lots of baseball playoff
games
and the World Series.

Besides, except for "Survivor" and the horrible "Big Brother," the networks
basically have been force-feeding viewers repeats for five months now. With
such a delayed start, the new shows have to be really good to get people
back
to their TV sets. And guess what? Most of the new shows aren't that good.

Most years there's at least one new show I can point to as an absolute gem.
Last year, there were two: "Once and Again" and the "West Wing." And both
of
those shows are back this fall. But this year nothing's quite up to that
level. There are a few new shows worth sampling because they're different
and
ambitious, so the best I can do is list them here and have you decide for
yourself.

One of the best knew shows, "That's Life," actually was sneak previewed by
CBS
last night. It stars Heather Paige Kent as a 30-something woman who decides
to change her life by going back to college. "Ed," which starts Sunday on
NBC, is a show starring Tom Cavanah as 30-something man who decides to
change
his life by returning to his hometown.

And perhaps the most original show of all arrives tomorrow night on Fox. It
comes from James Cameron, the director of "Titanic" and "The Terminator" who
is presenting his first series for television. It's a science fiction drama
called "Dark Angel" and it's visually stunning. Then again, so is its young
star Jessica Alba.

The basic plot of "Dark Angel" is that the world 20 years from now is pretty
messed up. Many computerized infrastructures have stopped working, the
police
and politicians are equally corrupt, and the government has even engaged in
genetic engineering, adapting and training kids to be superhuman,
superintelligent warriors.

In the prologue that opens this $10 million telemovie pilot, dozens of those
kids plot an escape and one of the few who makes it out is Alba's character
of
Max. She immediately goes underground, but 10 years later, events conspire
to
get her involved as a sort of secret avenger. In this scene, she's
pretending
to be a mercenary and meets in a seedy motel with a hit-man thug of a
powerful
crime boss. And even though he's holding the gun, she's holding all the
cards
and flashing all the attitude.

(Soundbite from "Dark Angel")

Unidentified Actor: Actually I don't know. I think you're pretty cool.

Ms. JESSICA ALBA (As Max): Yeah?

Unidentified Actor: Well, yeah. You're smart, you're hot, you stand on
your
own two feet, got a wicked sense of humor. Geez, zing the boss there a
couple
of times and that's all I can do.

Ms. ALBA: So what do you think? Maybe after I betray the woman who trusts
me
and you grease her and her daughter, we could go on a date?

Unidentified Actor: Yeah, you got a bad attitude.

Ms. ALBA: I like to try to keep it professional is all.

Unidentified Actor: So call her. Get her over here.

Ms. ALBA: Actually that's not going to be necessary.

Unidentified Actor: What?

Ms. ALBA: That's not why we're here.

Unidentified Actor: What the hell are you talking about? You call her.

Ms. ALBA: Geez, you are so stupid the word special comes to mind. Someone
sort of recruit you off the short bus?

Unidentified Actor: Call the skenk now!

Ms. ALBA: You haven't figured this out yet, have you? You walk in here
thinking you're gonna cap her, then cap me and take the money back to your
boss with your tail wagging. But it's really the other way around. You
think
I'm the whack. The fact is, you're the whack.

BIANCULLI: "Dark Angel" has the makings of a hit, especially if teen
viewers
find the show and like what they see. Most other series this year take very
good performers and stick them in shows without very good scripts. Andre
Braugher from "Homicide: Life on the Street" fairs the best in "Gideon's
Crossing." But Craig T. Nelson, Bette Midler and Geena Davis in their new
shows have to generate laughs or interest purely on the strength of their
own
personalities, and they don't succeed often. I don't want to start things
off
with the wrong attitude, but even though the season is starting late, it
already looks to be a fairly long year.

GROSS: David Bianculli is TV critic for The New York Daily News.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Profile: Grocho Marx singing "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady"
TERRY GROSS, host:

We'll close with Groucho Marx singing the Harold Arlen-Eb Harber song
"Lydia,
the Tattooed Lady." Groucho was born 110 years ago today.

Mr. GROUCHO MARX: (Singing) Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?
Lydia The Tattooed Lady. She has eyes that men adore so, and a torso even
more so. Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-pidia. Oh Lydia The Queen of
Tattoo. On her back is The Battle of Waterloo. Beside it, The Wreck of the
Hesperus too. And proudly above waves the red, white and blue. You can
learn
a lot from Lydia!

Backup Singers: La, la, la. La, la, la. La, la, la. La, la, la.

Mr. MARX: (Singing) When her robe is unfurled she will show you the world,
if
you'll step up and tell her where. For a dime you can see Kankakee or
Paree,
or Washington crossing The Delaware.

Backup Singers: La, la, la. La, la, la. La, la, la. La, la, la.

Mr. MARX: (Singing) Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia? Lydia The
Tattooed Lady. When her muscles start relaxin'...

(Credits)

GROSS: This is NPR, National Public Radio.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.