No lockpick required

Take a peak inside a compilation of entries in Leslie Arfin's Dear Diary

by Melody Caraballo
***published on venuszine.com***

Everyone likes to read diaries, even parents, which is exactly why some people just won’t keep that kind of evidence around. Luckily — or unluckily as the case may be — for the reluctant-to-document population, Lesley Arfin lays bare enough of her insecurities, realizations, and addictions for us to vividly recall our own. Dear Diary is culled from her Vice column of the same name, in which she excerpts her diary entries and remarks on them with the wisdom of age and occasionally, the aloofness of, you know, a Vice writer (see her recommendation to teenage girls to do shots of Jäger before losing their “V”). For the book, she took it a step further by calling up (and sometimes calling out) old flames, repudiated BFFs, and even the ‘rents.

“It felt very uncomfortable to interview my dad. It was a really hard phone call to make, probably the hardest. It is also hard for me now knowing that he has read it, but we don't talk about it,” she says. While Dear Diary is a pretty light read and will in no way supplant Go Ask Alice in the annals of young adult literature, Arfin hopes that her publication makes a difference and explains to her father that “Another girl, somewhere in Minnesota, might be going through the same thing and feel the same way. Maybe if she reads this, she’ll realize she’s not the only one who goes through this stuff.”

“This stuff” is both the tribulations of the seemingly trivial and the undeservedly significant nearly all experience on that long journey from the preteen years to adulthood. It’s Arfin’s sheer honesty that is most strikingly potent, reminding us that people are not two-dimensional and that even when reading a person’s diary, true personality is an amorphous and slimy lil’ abstract. In one conversation she says, “It’s starting to occur to me that I wasn’t this innocent victim … and was, in fact, a self-centered and evil bitch who liked to fuck with people and then conveniently forget it. Oopsies.” Here too is what gives Arfin’s writing its flair, call it an ironic breath of fresh New York City air — she is not frontin’, no matter how shitty a statement like that might make her look to the less self-aware.

Arfin faces demons, both bite-size (grade-school goons) and mountain-size (black-tar bundles), with equal fervor, and it looks like her diary has helped her through those ups, downs, and further-downs. “It also helps in sobriety too because I've found that knowing the truth about something in my head and writing it down on paper have lead me to very different results,” she adds. With her drug-addled past behind her, don’t expect this to be the last you’ll hear of Miss Arfin. Typical of her funny endnotes, she says, “I think I have a few more stomach-knotting titles to come in the future. There are a lot of different kinds of knots, as I've been learning from my sailor’s manual.”

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ABOUT THE BOOK:
Dear Diary (Vice Books)
By Leslie Arfin
231 pages
$20.00