Monday, April 14, 2014

Dear Nobody: The True Diary of Mary Rose

I just finished reading Dear Nobody: The True Diary of Mary Rose, edited by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil.

This is the collection of diary entries by a teenage girl suffering from Cystic Fibrosis in the late 1990s. Her writing is raw, powerful, angsty. Not always polished, but always full of emotion.

Mary Rose's life is a chaos of drugs and alcohol, a blur of other teens that are sometimes her friends but mostly not. She writes with anger and pride and dismay, but what comes across most is her loneliness. It is heartbreaking to read her entries and not be able to reach out to her.

It is also interesting to see her writing become more developed as the years go by. I found myself becoming more and more drawn in, more and more appreciative of her unique voice.

One entry I want to share:

"Dear Nobody,

Love is the creator of hate and the daughter of disappointment, as no two people could hurt each other more than two people in love. Don't put too much LOVE into love. Love is a whore to poets, musicians, songwriters, an artists; they use it as fodder to sell their frustrations and personal impotence -- and love is TOO BIG a responsibility. No human can live up to the capacity of love's expectations. A person will build you up so high, but once you are elevated, it's all the harder when you both fall. You become something to that person which is impossible to live up to. Love has power, not the lovers."

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