In the preface to her new book Dear Diary, Lesley Arfin writes, “Wanna see your future? This book is my whole life, and, give or take a few ridiculous circumstances, it’s yours, too. Here’s how it goes: you grow up in Long Island. First you’re cool. Then you’re not. Everyone hates you, and you get so insecure you start suppressing emotions by giving hand jobs and inhaling whippets. Then come the bad-girl years. Sound familiar?”
Arfin’s debut tome is comprised of the author’s own diary entries from age 12 to 24, updates from her current 28-year-old perspective, and interviews with people from her past. “This is every teenage girl’s story,” Arfin explains. What follows, however, during those “bad-girl” years, is not every girl’s story – which makes “Dear Diary” irresistible to many, even if it’s written primarily for 15-year-old girls.
After discovering sex, drugs and punk rock growing up in Syosset (on Long Island), Arfin attended Hampshire College. There, her drug use took off. “I even saw a therapist during my last year of college, and she said that every time I did dope, I had to tell her. So every week, I told her I had done dope. I told her I needed it to relax, and she suggested I replace heroin with kava kava. Nice try,” Arfin writes.... Read more of this article at psychoPedia.com
