Lesley Arfin
Biography
Lesley Arfin has been writing professionally since 2001. She graduated from Hampshire College and immediately started an internship at Vice magazine, where she then went on to write a number of articles, as well as her own column, "Dear Diary."
In 2007 her book, Dear Diary, based on the column, was published by Vice Books/MTV Press. The introduction to the book was written by Chloe Sevigny.
Lesley is the former Editor-In-Chief of Missbehave magazine.
She has freelanced for a number of publications: Jezebel.com, Jane, Nylon, iD, America, Purple, Paper, Jalouse, and she is currently the New York contributor to Australian magazine, Russh. Lesley has written columns for websites such as Street Carnage, Buzz Net, and Thought Catalog. She penned the introduction to the 2010 interior design/photo book The Selby: In Your Place.
Lesley has done commercial work for clients such as XBox, Burton, Sophomore, Kanon Vodka, and Nike.
She currently works as staff writer on the HBO series Girls, created by Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture) and produced by Judd Apatow.
Articles
Book
“Here’s your chance to have all the benefits of a tortured adolescence without the shitty childhood. Congratulations!” — Sarah Silverman on Dear Diary
Largely made up of the diary entries that Lesley Arfin wrote during her teenage and college years, Dear Diary captures everything that makes you cringe about adolescence: The awkward relationships, the social posturing, and the sex and drugs that swirl around both like a flock of diseased pigeons. Arfin injects humor into tales of parental abuse, drug addiction, and a whole pile of insecurity.
Dear Diary began as a wildly popular Vice column, which was made up of one of Arfin’s diary entries and an update written with the perspective ten years gives you.
The book takes this process one step further. Arfin, now 27, tracks down the “frienemies” listed in her diary entries and asks them probing questions like, “Did you French Josh?”
Dear Diary blurs the distinction between past and present, offering a stark, continuous, and cathartic commentary on the author’s life, noting every embarrassing detail and effusively documenting every mistake. This is Lesley’s story, true, but it’s also every girl’s story.
Readers of her generation will be stunned to see their ups and downs mirrored by Lesley’s—things like being into punk music and then switching to rave, or “being obsessed with boys that look like Harry Potter and having [your] heart broken by them,” as Arfin puts it. Much more than mere diary entries, this book is a reflection of life and the mistakes made along the way.
Dear Diary is a truly original work, a Go Ask Alice for the post-Kids generation of New York.
Press
Commercial
Blog
Contact
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