A few thoughts crossed my mind after letting the magnetized closure on Lesley Arfin’s Dear Diary snap shut. First, where can I cop a bundle quickly? (Forget about it) Second, how ridiculous would it be to get a call about jamming someone’s locker in sixth grade? (Extremely) And last, was I this lame in adolescence? (Pretty much)
Though Arfin’s collection of diary entries and updates hit mild peaks of interest—junior high girl-on-girl action and a long, lazy summer of opiate love—there’s a reason that the diaries of suburbanite girls rarely get published. They’re boring. If you’ve lived through the agonizing years of adolescence, then you’re over the whiny self-deprecation and novelty of getting felt up in the back bedroom. Those still in the teenage trenches are too absorbed with themselves to give a fuck about a girl that lived in the dark ages of raves and Zima. The person that seems to get the most out of Dear Diary is the Vice columnist herself. Arfin confronting every demon in her childhood closet smacks of the 12 steps but (thankfully) without the usual NA lingo.
All that being said, the first thing I did when I finished the book was pull out my own diary. Part of me was pretty pissed that I slept on the opportunity to rake in mad dough from something that’s been stashed in the top of my closet for so many years. Diaries and drugs are hot right now. A bigger part of me wondered if I was as clueless and misguided in my formative years. Affirmative. Though Arfin was a Long Island JAP and I was playing out New Jack City fantasies in small town Georgia, we could’ve been fast friends. Where she was constantly downing herself, I was so cocky it was embarrassing to read. She took drugs, I sold them. It was like yin and yang. But despite the obvious differences, our diaries were so similar they could be sold as a set. We both got into multiple girl fights, fell in love with unattainable guys and followed losers down the perilous path of drugs, music and promiscuity. I think every good American girl does at some point.
This is not a book for intellectuals nor will it replace Go Ask Alice as required reading any time soon. At best it’s a romanticized ode to H and a reminder that none of us were as cool as we liked to believe back in the days of backpacks and bubble gum.
