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.

After college, Arfin moved to the Lower East Side in Manhattan and got an internship at Vice magazine - a gig that, in 2001, eventually led to her own “Dear Diary” column, which featured Arfin’s old diary entries from when she was growing up.  Fast-forward six years -- the column’s namesake book bears an introduction by Chloe Sevigny which reads as follows: “When I first came across Lesley’s column in Vice I was struck by a very familiar-sounding angst.  It was a funny and refreshing change from the usual bullshit, especially in Vice.”

The Vice column didn’t include Arfin’s stint as a dealer, more drugs, and trying to kick heroin.  Arfin spent her first days of sobriety hanging out at Terry Richardson’s studio.  She recalls: “Most of the time I was just there, sitting around while models got naked and did splits for him, or maybe Vincent Gallo was doing something ‘wacky’ for the camera.  My mind was totally blown,“ she remembers of the period post-relapsing before going to rehab at Betty Ford, where she saw God in a strawberry and three rainbows on her way home. 

“Dear Diary” takes the reader up to the point where Arfin comes out on the other side and discovers herself as a writer again.  Her literary heroes are those whose personalities are intrinsically linked to their style, including Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson.  And Arfin’s love of diaries comes in part because they’re written without the intention of ever being read.  “I was really inspired by The Diary of Anne Frank.  She wrote with a lack of self-consciousness.  That blew my mind at a really young age.  Also, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer.  It’s awesome,“ she says over an orange juice at Pink Pony.

Arfin feels her experience is unique in that she can look back on it and laugh.  She writes: “You’re not me, but you’re kind of me.  You may not have had your ass kicked by your dad, learned how to weigh coke by a junkie named Skittles, or let a bi-curious ex cheerleader on K eat you out in the bathtub, but you made a hundred mistakes and you survived.  In fact it’s the mistakes that made you who you are today.”