Every once in a while an autobiography comes along that is not only touching and funny as hell but is also a fabulous warning about how not to be a dumb ass.

Lesley Afrin, a writer for Vice magazine took an interesting spin on the autobiography by taking her diaries from the time she was about twelve until a little after she graduated college. It covered her good girl years, popular girl years, bad girl years, and every other phase of girls and women she could go through including the dreaded bitch years and then her heroin addict year.

What I loved about this book is that she just didn’t publish select diary entries she went back and interviewed the people she wrote about. Including the girls who made her life hell in middle school, some of the boys she had been with, and friends she got high with. Some of the people she wrote about and wanted to track down seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth and some of them had died.

This can be looked at as a kind of ‘Go Ask Alice’ for a new generation, the only difference is that this is not faked. Also she doesn’t try to scare the people who are reading her book, she just tells them the facts about what she went through. For instance she talks about what drugs she liked that everyone should try at least once, and what drugs people should never try (like heroin).

The books relate-ability was what truly sucked me in. Afrin was only about four years older then me and had many of the same feelings through middle school. At that point I think our paths may have shifted as she feel into the drug scene and I feel into the loner scene.Still the general layout of a girls life is basically the same. You have friends, then you don’t, then you rebel, then you don’t care, then you become a bitch, then you have friends again, then you kind of start to grow up. But a little of the bitch never really leaves you.

With anecdotes about how you should drink a little before the first time you have sex and everyone should smoke pot or try shrooms. It is definitely worth a read. Not only for its relate-ability, but for many of the funny situations she finds herself in. For example, some of the follow-up interviews she does with girls she got into fights with in middle school and guys she dated in high school are quite awkward.

It’s a fabulous read for adults who want to remember their adolescence and teens who need to know they aren’t alone, but even if they follow her advice they will still do dumb ass things.