Over Easy

A fast-paced semi-memoir about diners, drugs, and California in the 1970s.

Over Easy is a brilliant portrayal of a familiar coming-of-age story. After getting denied financial aid to cover her last year of art school, Margaret Pond finds salvation from the straight-laced world of college and the earnestness of both hippies and punks in the wisecracking, fast-talking, drug-taking Imperial Café, where she makes the transformation from Margaret to Madge. At first, she mimics these new and exotic grown-up friends, trying on the guise of adulthood with some awkward but funny stumbles and then slowly realizes that the adults she looks up to are a mess of contradictions, misplaced artistic ambitions, sexual confusion, dependencies, and addictions.

Over Easy is equal parts time capsule of late 1970s life in California – with its deadheads, punks, disco rollers, casual sex and drug use – and bildungsroman of a young woman from naïve, sexually inexperienced art-school dropout to self-aware, self-confident artist. Mimi Pond’s chatty, slyly observant anecdotes create a compelling portrait of a distinct moment in time. Over Easy is an immediate, limber, and precise memoir narrated with an eye for the humor in every situation.