Cringe: Teenage Diaries, Journals, Notes, Letters, Poems, and Abandoned Rock Operas

Sunday, September 21, 2008   ·   

I received a copy of Cringe: Teenage Diaries, Journals, Notes, Letters, Poems, and Abandoned Rock Operas in the mail the other day. I was thrilled, partially because I almost never get packages in the mail, and partially because I met Cringe's editor, Sarah Brown of Que Sera Sera, at the BlogHer '08 conference in San Francisco, and I am a little bit smitten with her.

Way back in 2001, Sarah Brown began the bizarre habit of e-mailing the most embarrassing and painful pieces from her childhood and teenage journals to friends and family, which eventually grew into the first of many public Cringe events beginning in April of 2005. Sarah started hosting the monthly event at Freddy’s Bar & Backroom in Brooklyn on the first Wednesday of every month, and "...brave souls [came] forward and read aloud from their teenage diaries, journals, notes, letters, poems, abandoned rock operas, and other general representations of the crushing misery of their humiliating adolescence." After being featured in magazines, in newspapers, and on television over the next three years, Cringe found itself with a book deal and ended up in my happy little hands in mid-2008.

I immediately parked myself out on the balcony and read it from cover to cover in one sitting. Normally, my attention span runs off to a new place every thirty seconds or so, but I stuck with Cringe all the way from the Introduction (which I pretend to care about but rarely bother with in books) to the Contributor Bios (which I also usually skip, but don't pretend to care about). ALL of it was that good.



I could pass off my extended interest as a reaction to all the brightly coloured pages and the one-page length of all but a few of the submissions, but really it was the fact that it was so much like reading my own diary from the mid- to late-eighties. Is it wrong that it felt so therapeutic to read other people's cringe-worthy diary entries about unrequited loves at fourteen, the politics of friendship, and the misunderstood complexity of the goth aesthetic? Because, wow, did it ever. It didn't even feel the least bit pathetic that I found it entirely fulfilling to have my adolescent angst laid out and normalized through this collection of pained adolescent histrionics. It gave me a perspective and sense of humour that I sometimes still find difficult to maintain when it comes to the late-1980s / early-1990s period of my life. I had to deal with bucked teeth and a flat chest, damn it! Life was hard!

After I finished Cringe, I dragged out the box filled with my old journals and high school yearbooks. I was all ready to read the hate poetry I wrote about that classmate I couldn't stand but had to be nice to or about that heartrending time my unrequited love barely spoke to me for an entire weekend while a bunch of us were at the lake together. It was going to be painful and nauseating and oh-so-funny! Except that it was not to be. My box of journals is ominously devoid of anything from before I graduated high school. I am suddenly paranoid that I left them at my parents' house and that my mother knows what I did that time in the station wagon out in the church parking lot.

If you will excuse me, I'm off to call my mother.

Labels: not sponsored, reading materials, thumbs up

3 comments:  Sassy Brilliant review. To be honest I have destroyed most of my notes and stuff from high school. I find it so freaky to contemplate the person I was then. I'm only 24 so maybe it's too soon, or maybe I was too much of a freak. Anyway, I'm so buying this for my husband for Christmas. I know he'll love it.    Sarah Louise Brill. I have a huge shelf in my closet that houses journals from jr. high to present (although I journal far less than before.) I haven't looked at them recently.    Salena Great work.   post a comment ~ Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom] ~ main page