Also, I’d chosen Cherry as an ironic title: I felt—due to household upheaval and two childhood rapes—I’d lost my innocence long before I should have. But the more I wrote, the more I discovered that innocence had never left me, if you measure innocence as a capacity for belief—particularly a belief in love. What was mine in terms of hope and sweet longing had been with me all along—still, in some ways, is.
