I never intended to publish my childhood diaries," says Lori Gottlieb of the journals she stumbled upon. "In fact, I never intended to find them." While rifling through a closet in her parents' house, Gottlieb found something she wasn't looking for and barely remembered existed. The pages of these diaries served as a penetrating and ironic lens through which her younger self viewed the "mixed-up" world that surrounded her. "Of course they aren't overweight," Lori told her psychiatrist when asked if she thought the girls at school who diet are overweight. "Didn't I already say they were popular?"

An unflinchingly candid, bitingly funny debut, Stick Figure's compelling mix of irreverent humor and autobiography offers dead-on observances about everything from mothers to the medical profession, gender roles to the absurdities of society's obsession with beauty, and the confusion of being not quite a child, but not quite an adult yet either.