True confessions
of a real-life high school student on the cusp of a new millennium.
LIKE IT’S 1999
is the actual, unabridged, honest-to-god diary of a teenager in love with her
teacher.
Need Non-Fiction? Adore autobiography? LIKE IT’S 1999: Diary of a Teenager in Love with a Teacher by Giselle Renarde is now available!
Read the Introduction
LIKE IT’S 1999: Diary of a Teenager
in love with a Teacher requires an introduction more than
anything I’ve ever written. Why? Because unlike everything else I’ve written,
this is NOT fiction. It is the actual, honest-to-god diary from when I was 18
years old.
In
the summer of 1999, when this diary bursts into being, I was just heading into
my fifth year at high school, called OAC—Ontario Academic Credits. At that time Ontario’s school system required
an extra year’s education if you were planning to attend university. The OAC year doesn’t exist anymore, for those
of you keeping score at home. Everything
changes.
I
was an intelligent teenager, but also a bit hippie-dippy, as you’ll quickly
discover. As you’re reading these diary
entries, feel free to laugh or shake your head or roll your eyes, or all of the
above. Trust me, I did, as I transcribed
my hand-written journal. Seems like I
spent so much time being introspective that I’m not sure how I accomplished
anything else.
And
yet, for all my introspection, I’m actually incredibly dense. I can’t see the
forest for the trees. You’ll likely learn more about me from the dreams
interspersed throughout this book than from the diary entries themselves. They work together to paint a more
fleshed-out picture of who I was on the cusp of a new millennium.
If
you start reading and think to yourself, “Ugh! I can’t stand this girl!” trust
me, you are not alone. That’s how I
felt, reading this diary fifteen years after writing it. Just hold tight and keep going. Soon enough
you won’t be able to put it down.
When
you can cast aside the New Age veneer, you’ll find beneath it a naïve,
inexperienced young woman who is deeply infatuated with an English teacher. I
started writing this journal in the summer of 1999, while waiting on a letter
from this man, whom we’ll call Lawrence. He was away with his wife and family,
visiting his in-laws. He’d already written me one dull letter, with promises of
another. I was so sure he’d profess his
true emotions in that one.
Seems
like forever ago that we actually put pen to paper to convey our thoughts, then
sealed them in an envelope and pressed a stamp to the corner. Nothing was quite
so instantaneous as it is now. We had to wait.
And
that’s where this diary begins: me, waiting.
Reading
back, I shake my head at how off-the-mark 18-year-old me was in interpreting my
own life, not to mention my dreams. You’ll see what I mean when you read my
take on the first one, about receiving a birthday card from Oprah.
If
I could say anything to this younger version of Giselle, I’d tell her, “You are
a silly and self-involved child, and you won’t realize it until you re-read
these words in another 15 years.” I doubt if she’d believe me, though. She’d
probably slam her door, cry on her bed, and then write a journal entry about
it.
Just
a note that names have been changed to protect the guilty and innocent alike.
Okay,
enough procrastinating. If this reads like a 60-year-old huckster imitating a
teenaged girl, sadly it’s not. These are
unmodified journal entries, apart from the name changes. Even the punctuation
is original—I would never use so many semi-colons now.
You
start reading. Enjoy your time in my mind. See you on the flip side.
Giselle
Renarde
Barnes and Noble| http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/like-its-1999-giselle-renarde/1118723655
...and many other retailers!
Giselle Renarde is an award-winning Canadian author and
contributor to more than 100 short story anthologies from such diverse
publishers as Chicken Soup for the Soup, Oxford University Press, Simon and
Schuster, and Cleis Press. Her book The Red Satin Collection won Best
Transgender Romance in the 2012 Rainbow Awards. Giselle loves a geeky girl and
lives with two bilingual cats.
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