Over easy

Over Easy is a brilliant portrayal of a familiar coming-of-age story.

After being denied financial aid to cover her last year of art school, Margaret finds salvation from the straight-laced world of college and the earnestness of both hippies and punks in the wisecracking, fast-talking, drug-taking group she encounters at the Imperial Cafe, 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.

Gradually she 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 who grows from a naive, sexually inexperienced art-school dropout into a 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 fictionalized memoir narrated with an eye for the humour in every situation.