Teenage Memoir

A highly unsettling blend of true crime and coming-of-age memoir - The Stranger Beside Me meets Prep - that presents an intimate and thought-provoking portrait of girlhood within Manhattan’s exclusive prep-school scene in the early 1990s, and a thoughtful meditation on adolescent obsession and the vulnerability of youth.

As manic teens in the ’90s punk scene, Gogo Germaine and her girl gang of delinquents engage in a vivid spectrum of misbehavior—from truancy to tattoos to trespassing. Here, in the underbelly of adolescence, music is God and the rest is a rush of nihilism. Gogo and her friends stumble through sound and fury into questionable firsts at varying degrees of sobriety. Many of us blunder through that black hole. It is a point of universal convergence, manifested by divergent experiences. Gogo’s rebellion may look different from yours, but the visceral highs and lows will be familiar.

In the 1970s, outside the town of Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada, Barbara Ann is 13, going into grade seven, and starting a new school. She wants what most other teenage girls want: the right hair, the right clothes, the right friends, the right boyfriend, and everything else that leads to love and happiness. Innocence allows her to believe it’s all easily within her grasp, with the only obstacle being her overcontrolling mother. She fights and pushes against boundaries to gain the freedom she wants. Each step a power struggle between mother and daughter.

How to Be Happy tackles depression, friendship, sexual identity, suicide, academic pressure, love, and adolescent confusion. It’s a brave and honest account of one young man’s search for a happy, true, and meaningful life that will resonate with listeners young and old.

Daddy doesn't know. Neither does mama or my sister, Pita. It was just life in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn. An immigrant story of coming to America and the struggles to blend in and overcome the many obstacles threatening to derail a dream for a better life. What stories others could tell, but I know mine, and I'm no longer afraid.