Review—Dear Diary
A Memoir of Addiction by Vice Columnist Lesley Arfin
When the controversial New York-based magazine Vice was looking for someone to helm its upcoming "Dear Diary" column, Lesley Arfin, who had been writing intermittently for Vice and chronicling her life in journals since she was eleven, knew instantly she was made for the job. Beginning in 2003, Arfin extracted paragraphs from her diaries and shared them with Vice's readers. She also provided analytical commentary on them, giving the reader contextual background along with an adult retrospective reflection on the events described.
Arfin's book Dear Diary (Vice, 2007) does her Vice work justice. Having all of Arfin's entries collected in a single location and organized chronologically grants them an enhanced intimacy. While the book includes many of the original columns, additional entries flesh out the missing details from Arfin's life as depicted via Vice. As a result, the book exhibits an emotional vulnerability missing from the Vice column and a more complex portrayal of its author.
Go Ask Alice Meets Anne Frank
Because Dear Diary focuses exclusively on Arfin's drug addiction, the book has been inevitably compared with the "anonymously" scribed Go Ask Alice of the 1970s. In a 2007 interview with Papermag, Arfin admits early publicity touted Dear Diary as being a present-day version of the legendary young adult novel. Similar to Alice, the diary format allows the reader to witness Arfin's self-abuse in "real time," making for an intense yet riveting read.
Dear Diary shares several characteristics with another famous diary—that of Anne Frank. While the coarse writing and brazen Gen-X attitude of Arfin's diary is of a completely different echelon than Anne Frank's work, these two authors still have a good deal in common. For one, both publications are bare-bones honest. While Arfin's diary entries themselves occasionally lack sincerity (Arfin even calls herself on being an unreliable narrator at times), her adult "translations" bravely unveil the wounded and angry young girl she had once been.
Other similarities abound. Both diary writers grew up Jewish and hailed from upper-middle-class backgrounds. There can be no dispute that childhood photographs of Arfin on the title page of Dear Diary bear an uncanny likeness to Anne Frank. And while Frank was faced with a world war that deprived her of both freedom and eventually her own life, Arfin was confronted with a war zone of her own—at home, where her father was sporadically violent; at school, where drugs were rampant; and in her troubled relationship with herself. Luckily, and by the skin of her teeth, Arfin emerged alive.
Dear Diary's Interviews
Unlike the Vice column, Dear Diary features Arfin's brief interviews with old classmates, childhood friends, and ex-boyfriends. These interviews make her entries multidimensional, as they pair key players of her past with their present incarnations. Her stated intention for "digging up all the people from [her] past" was "finding out what went wrong."
Yet Arfin's interviewing on the whole comes across as being a touch cavalier, if not borderline vengeful. Although she responsibly informed her sources that whatever they said could be published, they were not privy to how their interviews would be framed in relation to the surrounding material. When Format magazine's Auriane de Rudder interviewed Arfin in 2007, Arfin confessed she hadn't been fully up front with her sources about the book's content. Rudder asked if, when discussing a possible interview with a source, did Arfin actually "go into how graphic [the book] was going to be"? Arfin replied almost sheepishly, "No, I guess not."
For example, when conducting an interview with her old high school friend-slash-enemy Darlene, Arfin is primarily interested in Darlene's post-high-school religious conversion to Jehovah's Witnesses. Arfin's inquiries begin innocently enough, but the subtle sarcasm evident in her probing demonstrates that her true objective is to milk Darlene for questionable responses. This enables Arfin to entertain her readers at Darlene's expense and simultaneously expedites revenge for Darlene's past offenses.
At the end of the interview, Darlene claims Arfin is free to "say anything bad" about her. She adds, "I own everything that's happened in my life and I'm not ashamed of it. So you can say anything at all." Arfin's one-word response, "Noted," comes off as flippant and foreboding. Despite Darlene's admirable self-assertion, it is Arfin who is in the privileged position of being the one who will decide how her old friend will be represented.
Dear Diary (Vice Books, 2007), ISBN: 978-1-57687-440-0, 232 pages.
Dear Diary by Lesley Arfin
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