For some reason memory brought up Mary Karr’s second memoir, Cherry, which details her adolescent experiences near Port Arthur, Texas (on the Gulf). At one point she recalls falling into a deep depression around age 13, although like all great writers, she doesn’t call it that; she describes her experiences, thoughts, and feelings. There was one passage that I found wry, sweet, and affirming, and that generated a welling in my eyes — both for the message of the tale and her method of writing. Here it is:

You spend a whole night writing an elaborate suicide note, in which you list every minor gripe and oversight. Lecia, you shouldn’t have hit me over that chicken pot pie. Clarice, I was a good pal to you, and you were a turd. John Cleary, no grinning and large-breasted pom-pom shaker could reveal the high-minded wisdoms I truck in. Before long, you’ve worked up to your parents, who are blind to the spit you feel yourself to be writhing on. Just thinking how bad they’ll feel reading this note makes you cry, but you keep writing, letting big tears splash the page so they’ll know how bad you felt.

Anacin from a brand new bottle get counted out till you reach one hundred — “one hundred bitter wishes,” the poet Craig Raine will write someday of another girl.

Thus readied, you step into this puddle of dress — the closet’s only black one — and pull it over your legs and up waist high. It’s satin-back crepe and slides over your skin like water, but too small so you have to struggle to get the zipper up. It’s short enough to pass for a shirt, and your hands hang down too long from the sleeves like a chimp’s.

You wash the pills down three and four at a time, but only get as far as ten or twelve pills before the melted pill taste is too bitter to stand. So you mash some with the spoon back, mix the powder in orange juice, hold your nose. Still the bitterness starts a gag. And since discomfort is not now (nor ever will be) your long suit (and since it’s less death than family attention you crave), you decide you’ve swallowed enough, skinny as you are.

Having cried yourself quiet, you now lie down in the bed and cross hands over your chest and arrange the skirt so your underpants aren’t gaping out at everybody. In this pose, you wait to die.

Then comes the first sliver of fear, a sharp and shining itch of it from the prospect of snuffing out. If you don’t exist, who will impart your tremendous insights, write the great poems you design in your head that never see paper? You lie there and listen to the neighbor dog yip-yipping, cars idling by.

Mr. Lawrence is digging in the side yard. He shouts to his wife, “this deep enough?” And she says deeper, it’s rose bushes. The blade crunches through the wet ground, and the spadeful of dirt and rocks hits the wheelbarrow. You want to fling open your window and shout, Show some respect! I’m killing myself here. But they keep remarking on the color and fullness of bloom.

Socrates never had this kind of insignificant crap to listen to after he took the hemlock. Somehow when he described the cold inching up his shins, it was sadder. But then Socrates has Crito leaning over him weeping, saying, Don’t you have something more to tell us? Good old Crito. Where is he when you need him? You have only the disinterested gaze of that cross-eyed Siamese and the nerve-wracking chatter of morons. You’re nowhere near dead — just wicked queasy, like that time deep sea fishing — when the sprinkler gets turned on so fake rain slaps your window at stunned intervals.

You pad through the house looking for an audience. Then it’s through blazing heat to the studio where — peering in the window — you see that Mother’s constructed a huge giraffe of papier-mache for some play at her school. How can that garish yellow contraption find a home in this pit when you can’t? It’s an indignity even to look at.

By the time your mother walks in less than an hour later, you’re kneeling on the cold floor tiles emptying the emptiness from your stomach into the small white emptiness of the wastebasket in your room. She helps you to the bathroom, dampens a washcloth to drape around your neck. You poor little duck she says, rubbing your back. You must have eaten something bad, she says. I’m throwing that old potato salad out, she says, and those shrimp your daddy brought home.

Bent over, sick and ashamed, you feel like the worst sort of fool.

When the heaves pass, Mother takes your angular self onto her lap in the ebony rocker. Your feet hang over the arms on one side. Poor poor you, she says. Your head lolls over her shoulder, your nose near the source of the Shalimar cloud that drifts around her — a smell of rose attar in oil. She says, You’re never too big to rock, but you’ll appreciate it, I know, if I leave off singing to you. Once when you wake up she asks what are you doing in that old dress, and you say seeing if it fits. And she says, That would be a negatory.

Still later, she strips you out of it and jams your arms in a cotton nightgown you wriggle on. Thus sheathed you lie on the couch, your head pillowed nearby while she combs your hair with her fingers.

When Daddy comes in, he carries you to bed. Is there anything you feel like you could eat, Pokey? Anything at all?

All you can imagine putting in your mouth is a cold plum, one with really tight skin on the outside but gum-shocking sweetness inside. And he and Mother discuss where he might find some this late in the season. Mother says hell I don’t know. Further north, I’d guess.

The next morning, you wake up in your bed and sit up. Mother says, Pete, I think she’s up. He hollers in, You ready for breakfast, Pokey? Then he comes in grinning, still in his work clothes from the night before. He’s holding a farm bushel. The plums he empties onto the bed river toward you through folds in the quit. If you stacked them up, they’d fill the deepest bin at the Piggly Wiggly.

Damned if I didn’t get the urge to drive to Arkansas last night, he says.

Your mother stands behind him saying he’s pure USDA crazy.

Fort Smith, Arkansas. Found a roadside stand out there with a feller selling plums. And I says, Buddy, I got a little girl sick back in Texas. She’s got a hanker for plums and ain’t nothing else gonna do.

Through the window you see the Lawrence’s new rosebush, its base of burlap sticking out of the fresh red dirt. Its white buds are tight-clenched knots. But it’s when you sink your teeth into the plum that you make a promise. The skin is still warm from riding in the sun in Daddy’s truck, and the nectar runs down your chin.

And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody — anybody — who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. That’s how you acquire the resolution for survival that the coming years are about to demand. You don’t earn it. It’s given.

–Copyright belongs to Mary Karr, Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.