Cherry by Nico Walker
I have a feeling this is one of those books that will fall strictly in the love/hate divide. With major caveats, I’m in the former. I’m the same age as the lead character. Born in the 80s, bored in the 90s, bombed in the 00s. 9/11. The recession. And though I’ve never done drugs or served in the military, I could relate to this story. Because this is the story of too many people I know. People whose lives were used and abused overseas. People […]
Not quite sure what to say about this book, because not quite sure what to think about it. This book was written after a Buzzfeed article detailing Nico Walker’s life (soldier in Iraq, has PTSD, comes home gets hooked on heroin, starts robbing banks to fuel heroin habit, goes to jail) piqued the interest of a book editor, who began pursuing him to write a book. So this is basically a fictionalized version of Walker’s own story. Which is one of the problems I have with it. […]
I recently read Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir and thought it was very good. I’d never read her or her memoirs before, so it was interesting dive into a writer who, being from Texas, which is not the South, but is not not the South either, and given how many Southern Lit classes I took in college, should have come up. Also, I used to live near Syracuse, so again…I am also interested in her other memoirs and will probably read The Liar’s Club […]
Mary Karr’s award-winning memoir of her early childhood in 1960s East Texas reads like a novel. This poet knows how to spin a yarn, and in this case, a mostly true story that focuses on the years she was about 6-8 years old. Mary and her older sister Lecia lived in a dysfunctional household, to say the least. At the center was their mother, an alcoholic who was battling depression and rages, the origins of which are revealed at the very end. Karr is an […]
