Candy-fluff with a razor edge. Overall, an easy, zero-pound read of teenage-girl drama - small shit that through rational eyes are pretty much guaranteed non-incidents, non-invents but which somehow inflate in magnitude to become utterly life-consuming and devastating (WHEN YOU HAVE BEEN AN 11 YEAR OLD GIRL. YOU WILL UNDERSTAND.) - told in a post-Juno, snippy voice. You doggy-paddle through the early stuff (GIRLS ARE MEAN!!! HATE U DAD) buoyed only by a sneaky sense of voyeurism, but then the drugs and the dependency and the rock-bottom enter the scene and, because Arfin finally starts to have the words to match her roiling gut, DEAR DIARY takes on a sharper turn: uglier but more involving, riskier but gutsier. It's not literature with an uppercase L, but for a book that demands so little of the reader (NO NEED TO ANALYZE THEMES; MOTIFS NEED NOT APPLY.), it packs some meaty punches; there're some wonderful raw passages, skinned of pretense and bleeding with desperation, that are worth it worth it worth it. ( )

Lots of drugs and sex; kind of like reading a really honest blog (or duh, diary). I liked that the author tracked down people she'd written about. It was a bit confusing, though - even with her maps and timelines. I mixed up the dudes, a lot. I also wish she'd written more about middle school because those are the parts I was totally grooving on and I felt like we were soulmates for that part. ( )

if you are in a proto-punk phase: someone should give you this book, you'll find it interesting and it might give you some good ideas about drugs and saying fuck you to middle schoolif you are in your punk phase: you will probably find it very close to your own experience, which may either excite you or disappoint you, depending on what emotional price you put on considering yourself unique in the worldif you are post-punk: you will like it because it reminds you of people that you know or were, and she will make you laugh, but the actual pleasure of the experience of reading will be diminished because you've heard this narrative when people you knew in high school catch you up on themselves at parties and all you want is to go get another damn beer. ( )