Dear Diary (Vice Books)

A regular contributor to all those hipster bibles—Vice, i-D, Nylon, Paper and the now-defunct Jane—Lesley Arfin, 27, has turned to what all pseudo-edgy auteurs eventually turn to—her “fucked up” adolescence. Except Arfin’s adolescence is achingly common: sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll (or punk, or rave, or whatever) is hardly atypical nowadays, especially when a healthy dose of introspection isn’t thrown into the mix. To her Vice column, which consisted of a diary entry from back-in-the-day paired with an update, Arfin has added interviews with the main players from her past in an attempt to decipher what exactly went down all those years ago. The end product is a 232-page book dripping with self-satisfaction, pretension (despite its staunch denial of such) and a peculiar sense of detachment.

But if you can get past Chloë Sevigny’s introduction and Arfin’s preface (both insufferable)—which arrogantly begins, “Wanna see your future? This book is my whole life, and give or take a few ridiculous circumstances, it’s yours, too. Here’s how it goes: You Grow up in Long Island. First you’re cool. Then you’re not. Everyone hates you, and you get so insecure you start suppressing emotions by giving handjobs and inhaling whippets”—the diary itself does capture some universals and is a great artifact from a time that differs from ours mostly only in music and fashion.

The problem is, Dear Diary is an exercise in self-reflection, and Arfin doesn’t seem to have done much of that. In fact, her updates offer little more insight than the original entries. The general sentiment is that people without issues are boring and superficial, or maybe that everyone has issues—both, granted. But the point of issues is to learn from them. Sure, we can be proud of being outcasted by those whom, looking back, we’d never want to embrace us. But you’d think at 27, Arfin and her ilk would be more concerned with what they are taking a stance against (or for), than in penning an ode to empty defiance.