In this memoir, Mary Karr recalls her teenage angst and her emergence in a wider - and wilder - world

In the cultural and geographical low country that was East Texas in the 1960s, Mary Karr was a wild girl with poetry and LSD running through her veins -- somebody who scared mothers, infatuated friends, tested teachers and other town authorities far past their resolve.

She was skinny and smart and not a little crazy, with the melancholy worn by legions of teenaged girls as "a kind of cerebral accessory."

Fleeing the mad unreliability of her family, she migrated early on toward the promises of the printed word, finding there -- in "Tarzan" or "Charlotte's Web" or "To Kill a Mockingbird" -- a certainty of cause and effect that real life rarely delivered.

By the time she hit high school in Leechfield, Texas, this was a girl who had already seen her mother threaten suicide and her father start down that longer road of drinking himself to death, but her own life course -- "to write 1/2 poetry and 1/2 autobiography" -- had been thoughtfully set down in a diary entry. So, too, was a self-diagnosis heartrending in its laconic accuracy. "I am not very successful as a little girl," wrote the 11-year-old Karr. "When I grow up, I will probably be a mess."

Well, yes and no; the happy ending implicit in such a confession is that someone survived to tell the tale, and tell it well enough to have staked a fair claim in the territory of contemporary memoir. With two books of poetry behind her, Karr achieved a dark and wide recognition in 1995 for her first memoir, "The Liars' Club," which conveyed hair-raising (and sometimes hilarious) stories through the kaleidoscopic beauty of Karr's narrative consciousness. "The Liars' Club" took the considerable risk of relaying a life through only two prismatic years of childhood, and its emotional weight was supported by its structural authority. If Karr the child had come unarmed through a minefield of troubles, Karr the adult had triumphed with the fortitude of wit and steel-edged grace.

Cast in the role of sequel, "Cherry" lacks the dramatic urgency and singular focus of its predecessor; its story can be resonant and captivating one minute and dissonant the next, as though the narrator has momentarily forgotten what she is doing here. But one of the cruel, unerring tenets of memoir is that it demands a fixed and articulated purpose, no matter how fine the voice or crystalline the memories. Otherwise, stripped of that angle of light, what you get is merely The Life, which, unless you are Winston Churchill, can be a fairly tenuous affair.

Alluding to the ripening fruit of girlhood in every sense of the word, "Cherry" seeks to give us a story of burgeoning sensuality -- of a girl whose physical desires were as dangerous and liberating as the lines of poetry she devoured. It's a memoir of adolescence, in other words, with all the attendant temptations of the 1960s: "the vagueness of mind, the boys, the drugs." The music that accompanies this rhythmic descent is half Hendrix, half dirge; we know from the prologue, as Karr is leaving Leechfield for Los Angeles in 1972, that the near future for her road-trip gang will be littered with suicide, jail terms, and drug overdoses. Then "Cherry" cuts back to the preceding seven years, when Mary would walk the cliff-edge between innocence and reckless thrill, trying to locate some place inside herself that was worth holding onto.

Not that she had many other choices of refuge. The girl's mother, Charlie, was a painter who married seven times, took huge quantities of alcohol and pills, and occasionally noticed her two girls long enough to cheer them on -- the kind of mom who's larger than life in literature and must have been a horror show day by day. Pete Karr loved his daughters equally well, which is to say with all his heart, but not so you could see it in new sneakers or homework or a clasped hand into adulthood. Lecia, older by two years, was the thick link between Mary and a semblance of truth and sanity: the one who needled and disdained her little sister but finally gave her the goods on their parents. "These people don't have any sense, Mary," she tells her at the end of one long drama siege. "Hasn't that dawned on you? Not the sense God gave a goat."

Somewhere in all this Karr had found the mystical ardor of words, in her mother's volume of Shakespeare and in the library and classroom. Navigating through her home life and the stifling ennui of Leechfield with this arsenal of introspection, she also found something even warmer and more immediate -- the touch of a boy's kisses in a dark garage, where fear and desire conspired to offer a different kind of flight. Thus begins the real journey of the prodigal daughter, anchored by poetry but fueled by the ever-fiercer demands of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Karr graduated from sweet desire to full-fledged rebellion, glimpsing within those moments of hallucinatory splendor how scary life could be when the whole plan went south.

"Cherry" is an erratic book. The voice that propelled "The Liars' Club" defines this memoir as well, but its story feels desultory and sometimes forced. Oddly, the sexual awakening at the narrative's center can be evocatively told, but it doesn't add up to very much. What girl didn't thrill to those first encounters of shared longing, when the body galloped headlong toward what it wanted and the heart and mind cantered behind? These passages are lovely but familiar, and they are marred by Karr's insistent use of adolescent vernacular to talk about sex: By the time you're out of the ninth grade, "boning" ought to be a word reserved for fish.

More unfortunate is Karr's decision to write most of this memoir in the second person and present tense. One can imagine a litany of reasons for this device -- an aversion to "I," an implication of ironic distance or universality -- though none justifies what is effectively a distraction. In both memoirs, Karr's story has drawn its strength from two bountiful sources: its intrinsic intensity and the stone-smooth cadences of Karr's voice. A sentence like "you know that years of wandering lie ahead for you" belies those talents -- it sounds coy even when it isn't meant to, and it gets in the way of what ought to be the core of any memoir: its eternal (and individual) witness.

What comes through beautifully in "Cherry" is the emerging self that outlived its events: the flat-chested 11-year-old who, casting caution to the Texas wind, tore off her shirt and rode her bike around the block wearing nothing but red shorts. The poetry-quoting girl who, as her mother tells her, wants to have a secretary instead of be one. That combination of sass and sensibility is what made Mary Karr the writer she is, and I wish she had trusted its essence enough to give it the singular first person it deserves.