The Cheerleader
Jill McCorkle
summary
Jo Spencer is a girl who knows what to be and how to be it-straight-A student, cheerleader, May Queen, popular and cute and virginal, and in perfect control. But halfway through her first year in college in the early seventies, her carefully normal life explodes and she comes completely undone. In The Cheerleader, Jo Spencer looks back, as if she were watching reruns of old syndicated TV shows, to figure out what happened.Ordinary chance has dumped Sam Swett, age twenty-one, in the Marshboro, North Carolina, Quik Pik in the middle of a murder. Sam has shaved his head, given away all his belongings except his typewriter; he's drunker than he's ever been and running as fast as he can from his upper-middle-class upbringing. For the next twenty-four hours, Sam is propelled straight into the very core of this small Southern town as it sorts through the facts.
Published September 30th 2003 by Algonquin Books
characters
Jo Spencer
Lisa Helm
Cindy Adams
Tricia McNair
Red
Jill McCorkle
quotes
"I think as a child it was wonderful to discover that I had this power to make myself laugh or cry, and of course that grew into wanting to have the effect on others."- Jill McCorkle
"For me, the greatest reward in writing is the stability and the pleasure that it brings to me. I love the act of writing. That may be why I have trouble rationalizing to everybody why I do it, because I’ve never come to a point where I feel like its work. I feel it is a real luxury. I think it is fantasy life."- Jill McCorkle