Unlike her contemporaries, Lesley doesn’t come armed with a photographer/designer /stylist tag – instead she chose the pen as her sword, and attacks from the heart with her own brand of curious quill. In her first published book – Dear Diary, Lesley exposes her flaws – warts/drugs/dating disasters ‘n’ all, in an honest, open and raw take on life as-is in today’s society. She’s the realest dawg, a true playa. Giving it real, living it large and with a turn of phrase that would make Morrissey enamoured, we are proud to call Lesley an i-D contributor. But don’t forget – this book is light, fun and a snappy read. Lesley takes you on a rollercoaster ride through a dark and depressing tunnel then comes out, hands in the air, whooping, stronger and happier then ever before. Lesson learned. She’s the bomb. Tick… Tick… Tick… Tock… BOOM!
READ Lesley Arfin on why Grimes is her personal Pinterest board
I used to avoid spending time with Lesley Arfin because I would rather enjoy the possibility of having her as a best friend forever, than attempt the real thing and risk anything. When we first met at a Y-3 party during a New York fashion week four years ago, she had recently quit heroin and consequentially had a thing for roomy dresses like the one she had on that night.
“They were for pregnant women and I was fat,” she explains with the candor that characterises her new book Dear Diary – the best read since The Da Vinci Code and No One Here Gets Out Alive: The Biography of Jim Morrison. It’s based on her Vice columns of the same name that examine her diary entries from when she was an 11-year-old in 1990 living in suburban Syosset, Long Island, when she had a lot of summer camp, Betsey Johnson dresses and all-ages shows in her future, to when she was 25 and living in Manhattan with a couple of rehabs behind her, a lot more figured out and a book deal in the bag. At 28, she’s lean and hot, especially in the oversized Jewish mother frames that she sometimes wears to emphasise her nose, which at the right angle recalls a soft, young Cher. “Look at this dress. Now I’m this,” she says with swan realness as she extracts a tiny, ruched, strapless minidress with bows from the rack of clothes at the foot of the bed. “It’s skin-fucking tight.”
The cover of the book is a Richard Kern photograph chosen by its publishers of a sad-faced girl stuffing her bloody nose with a napkin. Lesley had the idea that it should look like the jacket of a girly diary but with cigarettes, razor blades and condoms as content. In one of her first entries, as an 11- year-old, she writes about how she hopes that her diary will be published after she dies, like The Diary Of Anne Frank and The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer (she also mentions skeleton earrings, a math tutor, and someone named Alexis frenching someone else named Ian). It’s a darkly funny and strangely precocious agenda. “All I knew was that I wanted to be cool. I didn’t want to miss out on anything ever,” she says. “There were many times when I didn’t think I was hardcore enough. Like when I was in my first rehab, there were people that were like, ‘What… you were only doing five bags a day?’ I didn’t think I lived hard enough.” It’s not an unheard of trajectory, however, some make it, and others don’t, something that Chloe Sevigny addresses in her introduction for the book that she calls, “Why I Love Dear Diary”. As Chloe writes, “All of our stories and paths are different. I didn’t go to the same lengths that Lesley did, thanks in part to books like Go Ask Alice and films like Christiane F.”
The arrival of Vice was a big moment for a young Lesley. At the time, she didn’t know the Editor and co-founder Gavin McInnes, would write as Christie Bradnox, an ex-girlfriend whose name he used as a pseudonym. “I thought it was a female writing it and I wanted to be that girl,” says Lesley. “It was so funny, it was so obnoxious, it was so mean and it was true. That, to me, was having the ultimate set of balls. It wasn’t hopping freight trains which is scary and not something that I’ve ever done but in the back of my mind that’s a yet. That’s a cool yet. I’m a cool person but I never hopped freight trains.” She later became a part of the Vice brain trust that crystallised when the brat punk Canadian magazine relocated to New York City, the members of which will probably reunite in ten years for a group photograph by Ryan McGinley of them all naked in a tree. Lesley’s voice is as essential to the youth culture canon as those of her celebrated friends, who are now brat punk adult successes. She can impressively render the flawed, tense and ugly details of life without resorting to writing like a writer, and she makes a point of not romanticising one more fallen angel. Instead she reaffirms the successes possible for outcasts, as long as they can keep themselves alive long enough. “It’s that whole Oprah school of thought. If you share your problems and you’re honest with yourself, it’s contagious,” she says.
Once she cleaned up – something that has become a staple ritual of the American countercultural narrative – she sought out a direction. She assisted Cindy Greene; the co-designer of Libertine, back when the label was beginning to crest and Cindy was still a member of Fischerspooner, just after the band’s big American moment. Next came styling work, “But I hated it. I wanted to work with teenage runaways,” she says. And then the book happened. “I’m so grateful to be alive, even when I’m upset. I really flipped the coin,” Lesley says, because now the world feels as good as the big car reveal on My Super Sweet 16, which is usually a Lexus or better. “I love life. It’s my gimmick, I guess. Kittens and ice cream sandwiches for breakfast.” If things go the way they should, Dear Diary will be optioned into infinity, she’ll have a signature line of plastic make-up cases and accessories for tweens, and she’ll be the face of a magazine with a fresh new attitude called Lesley. For now, she has a new vintage Gunny Sack dress that her boyfriend gave her in a garbage bag; she hasn’t touched slouch boots since the early millennium; and she’s made her peace with unicorns. “They’re kind of played. I’m letting the kids have them,” she says. If Lesley had to choose, she prefers a pegacorn. “That’s a flying unicorn,” she explains. “I mean, why have a unicorn when you can have a pegacorn?”
Credits
Text Mark Jacobs
Photography Glynnis McDaris
Styling Frances Tulk-Hart
[The Ice Cream Issue, No. 278, July 2007]