Jolene Siana was a grumpy teengoth from Toledo, Ohio, who obsessively wrote letters to Ogre, the self-eviscerating, heroin-in-the-eyeball-shooting frontman for psycho-disco freaks Skinny Puppy, for 2-and-change years in the late 80’s. She scribbled out the painful minutia of her high-school life to the gloomy singer as a form of teenage exorcism, spilling out the mundane horrors of adolescence on paper, just as she spilled her own blood in semi-regular cutting rituals. You know, the usual stuff – Mcjob at the mall, mother who thinks she dresses like a freak, nobody understands her, she’s gonna eat some worms.

Many, many years later (2002), Ogre mailed ‘em all back to her. This book is a collection of those letters and journal entries, presented chronologically. While the individual letters and notes are mostly pouty, self-indulgent jibber-jabber – we are talking about a goth-chick here – taken as a sweeping view of the Teenage Wasteland, circa 1988, it’s a pretty effective piece of work. Siana doesn’t necessarily turn from caterpillar to butterfly in the short expanse of time that she wrote to Mr. Drugdustrial, but she does grow, change, and eventually bloom into her own moody blood-flower. And that’s always nice to see.

I read this book, literally, at red lights this August, which gave me the opportunity to chew on each entry for awhile before going on to the next. And while “Hello. Yesterday was hell” isn’t the greatest opening line I’ve ever read, I definitely felt like I was being drawn right in to this poor girl’s struggle to find herself. Perhaps it’s because we’re the same age, but I began to palpably feel the boredom, anguish, and occasional narcotic elation of her young life. This was not particularly FUN for me, but it was REAL, and that counts for a lot. And since she's now a successful photographer/writer, I guess you can say it's even got a happy ending. Which isn't very goth, but what the hell.

If you buy this book specifically for the sub-title though, you may be disappointed, as Jolene really only mentions cutting herself in passing, and even then just a handful of times. As such, the “deathrock cutter” tag smacks of sensationalism to me. Which is weird, really. What sort of human WANTS to hear about goth girls slicing themselves up with razors to relieve the pressure of Skinny Puppy fandom? Everybody loves a suicidal teenager, I guess. At any rate, the goth girls didn’t like me in high school because they thought I was a brutish metalhead (goth chicks HATE metal dudes for some reason, probably even today), but thanks to Jolene, now I know what they were really like. And now I know I was better off with the drunky-drunky Lita Ford look-alikes anyway.

PS: Dear dudes in Sloppy Seconds, You can just  keep my letters.  Cuz I don’t wanna know about it.