TATTLETALE.

Cherry
Mary Karr
Viking, $24.95, 276 pp.

Mary Karr has now written two narratives of her childhood, which can stand as Exhibits A and B in the Case of the Contemporary Memoir. Past evidence suggests that we are a nation of first-person narrators, confessing our own sordid histories while we peek in on the neighbors' stories. We don't often invoke our right to privacy--on the contrary, we're ready to spill all--and we certainly don't seem overly concerned with the privacy of lives that have intersected ours.

The literary memoirist may operate on a slightly higher plane than the talk-show exhibitionist, but faces the same dangers: the seductions of self-justification, self-aggrandizement, self-absorption, self-delusion. I am happy to report that in both accounts of her early life, Karr's writing tends toward the generous impulse, not the selfish. She gives her all in language, empathy, and forgiveness--but she is not above a little titillation. Both memoirs rely on a sexy, suggestive narrative come-on, yet their conclusions about sex and all human intimacy are thoughtful.

Karr's first memoir, The Liars' Club, was a long-standing bestseller and brought her to prominence. The story of Karr's upbringing in East Texas (and briefly in Colorado), The Liars' Club is told in a bemused, humorous voice. It is a litany of sorrows, beginning with her flamboyant parents' alcoholism, progressing through two chilling accounts of sexual abuse, and ending with the uncovering of the great secret of her mother's early adulthood. The title and the central motif--her father's embellishing of his own life story for the sake of his drinking buddies--ask readers to consider the ways the narrator may be tailoring the story to fit her own needs. Much of The Liars' Club is told in a swaggering Texas drawl, which doubtless adds to its popular appeal but which strikes me as oddly coquettish. Karr is a poet who writes beautiful, bracing lines, but throughout both memoirs she gives her childhood self a precocious way with words that hovers in that realm between fancification and falsification. In The Liars' Club, for instance, she has her seven-year-old self "screaming to Carol Sharp that her Jesus was a mewling dipshit"; in Cherry, Mary, age six, receives a mash note that says, "If you play nasty with me, I'll like you for one year." Perhaps both lines are reported verbatim, but the neat way they fit into the narrative's design makes me wonder. Karr herself is amused by the way we reconstruct our childhood selves: "In actual written artifacts from my past, I sound way less smart than I recall having been."

Cherry focuses on Karr's sexual coming of age. I dislike the title, a cheap bright lipstick smeared on the book's face, promising another lurid tell-all that isn't exactly forthcoming. Though Karr is frank about her early sexual experiences and desires, her book integrates her intellectual and social coming-of-age with her sexual self-discovery, and takes seriously all the struggles entailed. Hers is the story of the bright girl in the small town, observing the way her bright parents trapped themselves in lives that can't contain their longings.

For the purposes of this second exploration, Karr shifts her voice to a second-person narrative. This addressing of the self as another person (a device I'd hoped had been left behind in the '80s) is obviously supposed to signify the distance between the present narrator and the past subject, but it comes across as mannered here. It's a small enough mannerism. Though the book opens with a bad-girl, listen-to-me-talk-dirty tone, it settles into the kind of sharp observation that evokes not just one little girl's life but a whole American era, in which Mary Karr's (and my) generation replaces alcohol with psychedelics, early marriage with early sex and birth control pills. The ensuing road trip leads, often as not, to jail, suicide, and disaster for Karr's childhood friends.

The oddest disjunction in Cherry concerns the abuse depicted in The Liars' Club. The earlier passages--describing Karr's rape at seven by a teenage neighbor, and her abuse by a babysitter at twelve--are stark and distant, removed in precisely the way we might expect. In Cherry, those early events are not acknowledged until well into the narrative, and their evocations are parenthetical: "(Undercurrent: a boy in the dark bucking over your seven-year-old body....)." As a teenager, after she sleeps with her boyfriend for the first time, another pair of parentheses appear: "(How odd, you'll later think, that you embarked on your first love affair--meant as an intimacy--with such a large sexual secret in tow.)" The lack of analysis is completely understandable, but the presentation of these events as afterthoughts in a young woman's sexual re-initiation underscores the difficulties of our confessional age: there are still events so painful that they resist the unveiling of the self. Perhaps the sexual woundings reveal themselves in other ways; there's a crude recurring phrase used in this book, about what it is that boys are chasing, that reflects the hurt in an offhand, even unconscious, way.

In any case, Cherry's greatest strength is not its revelation of self but its recognition of others. Karr offers up loving depictions: of her childhood genius friend, Meredith; of the nonjudgmental surfer boys whose communalism appears, however briefly, utopian. She holds herself to a high standard of responsibility, and her deep empathy for family and friends leads her to question her commitment to them. Years after watching a girlfriend cut herself, she asks: "Couldn't you have told someone? Or just left the room? Surely witness is tacit approval." This memoir, and the one that precedes it, become the opportunities to "tell someone." At their best, both offer witness and the kind of introspective questioning of self that can be instructive to even the voyeurs among us.

Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of five novels.