Mary Karr looks pretty agitated. She's out with a photographer one minute and then stomping back the next, huffing and puffing, arms flapping, him scurrying behind. Rain. She sits down, takes off her thin leather coat, offers her profile for about 10 seconds, and then she's up again, shakes his hand, scrambles back into her coat, and turns to me, flipping the switch on a megawatt New York smile. "Hi, I'm Mary." She is powered by nervous energy, thoughts almost visibly zinging around her brain as she speaks.
Mary Marlene Karr grew up in a working-class family in small-town Texas, the younger of two girls with an alcohol-soaked father and a pill-popping bohemian mother who suffered the occasional nervous breakdown and married seven times, twice to Mary's father.
Mary was raped at eight, at 10 developed an enduring crush on neighbour John Cleary, enjoyed her first kiss with him a couple of years later, was put on the Pill by her mother at 14, had her first giddy romance at 15, and directed her own loss of virginity, with him, the following summer. There followed trouble at school and the psychadelic rush of surfer boys and drugs, and at 17 she ran away - with her mother's blessing - to Los Angeles with barely $100 to her name.
She was a thin, athletic kid, a bit of an oddball, who dreamt of becoming a famous poet. Her party days went on into her 30s and many of those she hung around with wound up in prison or with AIDS or "hit by cars in the witness protection program". But Karr survived and thrived.
She is still thin and athletic, but is now a prize-winning poet and essayist. She did go on to college, but dropped out after two years. She never did get that BA, but was taken into graduate school anyway, taught at Harvard Business School and is now Professor of English at Syracuse University, New York State. She is 45, divorced.
In 1995, her childhood memoir, The Liars' Club, grabbed the heart of America, topped the best-seller lists and was hailed a classic. Her new book, Cherry, is about her coming of age. It is pure poetry, a touching, funny telling of the thrills and terrors of the teenage years.
So how did she swing the happy ending? "I think having a financial flamethrower on your butt makes all kinds of things possible," says Karr. And she's greedy for more. "I've got a wicked shoe habit and I want to earn every nickel I can. I'm quite shameless that way." She says it's because she grew up poor and is a single mother. She takes out her son's photo. "Isn't he a cute baby? He's a great kid, far saner than I was at that age." He is 15, no doubt going through his private adolescent agonies as she's travelling about the world publicising hers. "Can you imagine anything more humiliating than being related to me? The problem I had in Cherry, you wake up and your parents are gargoyles, I think is ubiqutous."
There are plenty of books about how boys deal with these gargoyles. What's different about Cherry is that it charts a path to young womanhood. "Women don't write memoirs about this age," she says.
"They write about childhood, and they write about age 17, 18, college on, or they write about aberrant sexual stuff - a rape. But about sort of how you get a boyfriend - guys write about this all the time, but there's just no female equivalent." It's her poet's gift that enables her to draw out in intimate detail the longings of the teenage female soul. "I get all this mail that the steamiest parts of this book are all very innocent moments," she says. "Giving John Cleary a backrub when we were in junior high was a more erotic experience, even though it was really chaste." By contrast, years later, when she sleeps with her boyfriend for the first time, she's disappointed - she realises just as it slips away the magic of innocence.
In Cherry, she's clinging on to innocence in all its forms. When I ask if she's forgiven her mother, she's incredulous. "For what?" Well, for storming in and locking herself in the bathroom a whole day, threatening to kill herself, leaving 11-year-old Mary screaming to go ahead then, for a start.
"Oh, my mother was a poor little thing at moments like that," she says. "But that's the kind of thing you're angry about when you're 13 years old. I think everybody always disappoints everybody in every family. I think I've been pretty well-treated all in all.
"That was the hard thing about writing Cherry: my difficulties become self-inflicted. I cease to be a victim and become a volunteer, you know?"
She dedicates the book to St Jude, patron saint of lost causes. "It's really unlikely, even that we would be alive," she says. "I came of age when there were a lot of pharmaceuticals about. I do feel I've dodged a bullet." She quit drinking about 12 years ago - "I was driving into stuff" - and stopped doing drugs.
She converted to Catholicism five years ago. Her son had decided at six that he wanted to go to church "to see if God was there".
"I didn't like soccer either, but we used to play soccer. So we did this thing I called the Godarama," in which they tried out for size the religious practices of everyone they knew. "We just found ourselves really at home in this Catholic church, oddly enough."
Her mother marched for Martin Luther King. When asked about the new US president, George Bush, former governor of Texas, she says primly: "I am sure he is doing the best he can." But he wasn't her choice and it takes little to get her worked up about executions carried out each year in her home state, and the poor deal for African-Americans. She helps out within the system, raising money for literacy and libraries with Laura Bush.
She is still close to the friends in the book. They are making money in insurance, sales, advertising. Among her entourage to London is Doonie, whose drug-dealing career took off after another kid, Hogan, stole a sack of drug samples from a chemist; while Hogan was awaiting trial Doonie made him go back and steal the reference book, so he could tell which pills were which. Doonie is clean-living these days too. He's in construction, a multi-millionaire.
Karr is friends with her first boyfriend, with her ex-husband, with her ex-fiance of a few years past. "We didn't get married, but he's my English publisher. We're genuinely good friends." She and her son went to dinner with him and his new wife a few days ago. "I'm good at staying in touch, dogged about it. I'm the kind of person who, when they make a friend, gets really dug in."
She's still a little bit in love with John Cleary. "I see him all the time," she says. "He is a saint. His wife has been an invalid for ever - she has lupus. He has raised three children by himself and worked as well as taking care of this sick woman. Really, he is an amazing human being."
Life has taken her to dizzying heights, but Karr keeps her feet firmly on the ground. She lives in a small town, where she isn't tempted to think of herself as "a big deal". Teaching at Syracuse is "one of the great privileges of my life. It forces me to question what matters to me, what I'm passionate about." She has dinner with the likes of Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, plays raquetball with Frank McCourt's wife, Ellen.
She and Doonie went surfing recently in Los Angeles. He stayed at the Ritz, she at the Four Seasons. "The first time we came there at 17 we stayed in a car," she says, awed by their luck.
But that doesn't mean she's made it. Oh no. "You know, we went to see Hamlet in London the other day, and I have a sense that what I aspire to as a writer is far more grandiose than anything you could imagine, anything I have ever accomplished. So I don't feel like I've dinged that bell yet."
Cherry, by Mary Karr, is published by Picador (IR£14)