Over Easy - Paperback

by Mimi Pond (Author)

A fast-paced semi-memoir about diners, drugs, and California in the late 70s

After being denied financial aid to cover her last year of art school, Margaret takes a waitressing job at local Oakland fixture: the Imperial Café. Here an impressionable young woman transforms into the worldly Madge as she is introduced to the wisecracking, fast-talking, drug-binging cooks, dishwashers, and waitstaff in her new life. 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 these adults she idolizes 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 naïve, 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 semi-memoir.

Author Biography

Mimi Pond is a cartoonist, illustrator, and writer. She has created comics for the Los Angeles Times, Seventeen magazine, National Lampoon, and many other publications. She has also written for television: her credits include the first full-length episode of The Simpsons, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", and episodes for the television shows Designing Women and Pee Wee's Playhouse. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the painter Wayne White.