Over Easy

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.