Hannah Friedman

From a Q & A with Hannah Friedman, author of Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool:

Why did you decide to write a memoir about boarding school?

This is all stuff I wish some big sister would have told me when I was in high school. There's a lot of great teen fiction, but it's very ... fictitious. It's fairy tales about idealized romances, and these girls don't have real problems. They're not worried about their period, or if their breasts are normal.

Does it feel odd to publish a memoir at such a young age, about a time that is only five years behind you?

It made sense to me to write this memoir now, because it's fresh in my memory. These people are still sometimes in my life ... or in my Facebook feed. I'm still in touch with those experiences and emotions. If I had waited until I was 40, I don't think it would be realistic. And teenagers deserve an honest memoir just as much as adults do.

You don't seem to hold anything back. In one scene, you're naked and vomiting. In another, you're abusing laxatives. Was it difficult to be that honest?

Once I decided...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue