Barfin’ Arfin.

Some of you might know Lesley Arfin because of her regular column in Vice magazine where she published her very own diary from age 11 to 25. Honestly i never happened to read her column though i read Vice magazine every once in a while and dare to say that i really enjoy that kind of stuff. When Johannes showed me their newly launched website a few weeks ago (which i think is also genius because it turned into a very entertaining web-tv website) i discovered the “Dear Diary” channel by Lesley Arfin (subtitled “Digging into the past with Lesley Arfin and her celebfriend Chloe”). I was immediately hooked because i am always interested in diaries and teenage angst (and also celebrities to be honest - i need my daily dose of d-listed and Perez Hilton..).

I myself never wrote any diaries. The few times i tried to do it i always had to barf all over the pages i just wrote because i couldn’t stand the blabber. I guess Lesley wasn’t so uncomfortable with her own writings, she just wrote and wrote and wrote about being popular in junior high, being an outcast in junior high, having bad ass friends in high school, being into hardcore and punkrock, then being into raves and special K, then going to Hampshire college where she started the harder stuff, finally living in New York City and becoming a full-blown junkie ending up in rehab twice.

Today she is clean and a while ago she dicided to turn her column into a book. Besides the diary entries there are little passages where she is interviewing her friends and enemies from the past (some of whom she hadn’t been in touch for years) which makes the book different from the vice column. When i read this book there were a lot of things that sounded familiar (okay, just to be clear here: i was never into the heavy narcotics department and therefore never had any excursions to the Betty Ford Clinic ;-)). Sometimes it makes you laugh hard and sometimes it even makes you almost cry, but after all it is a very honest book! Buy!