SOURCE: Sayers, Valerie. “Tattletale.” Commonweal 127, no. 19 (3 November 2000): 27-8.

In the following review, Sayers comments that, though Cherry avoids many of the pitfalls of contemporary confessional memoirs, the volume's narrative voice is ultimately flawed.

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 talkshow 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...