Over Easy - Mimi Pond

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.

“Pond offers a vivid, perfectly rendered snapshot of the late '70s, that strange, lost period of time that bridged the hippy '60s and the go-getter '80s. The '70s culture was groping toward an identity, and it’s the perfect backdrop for Pond’s young heroine, who was busy doing the same.” —Robert Kirby, The Comics Journal

“The tale of an art student who gets a job in a diner and much more: a look at a handful of people, brought together by a shared affection for the fringes, who make a temporary haven for a young woman thirsting for Real Life.” —Etelka Lehoczky, NPR

“A sublimely evocative depiction of California in the ‘70s.” —Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

“For lovers of tawdry tales from the '70s, told with smarts and sensitivity, Over Easy is a gold mine.” —The Los Angeles Times