Suburban Legend: A memoir

Darkly humorous and casually devastating, this autobiographical collage reads like a locked, hot pink Y2K diary full of suburban darkness, chronicling Diana's Myspace-era coming of age. As she makes the transition from numbed-out teen to young adult, she finds herself unable to move forward in her own tale of romantic love. To find her future, she has to come to terms with and take back a childhood ripped off by incest and abuse. Each essay puts dark memories in new outfits: late-night confessions to AIM chatbot SmarterChild, every romantic first for better or for worse, police reports, found poems from therapy, and conversations of a Vietnamese family marked by cycles of violence. Experience the hot, chaotic world of a trauma-fractured girl on a quest to find out if happiness-and not just technical survival-is possible. But how will she know what the bright, glaring light of happiness looks like, after so much time in the dark? Could the boy she fell in love with help, or hurt?