The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer entered my life at precisely the right age. At fourteen, I was the sheltered child of strict Catholic parents and sister to a supernaturally smart older brother, and had recently been displaced from my
parents’ central focus by the birth of a younger sister, with yet another on the way. I reacted by fighting tremendously hard to throw off my naiveté and innocence and dive headfirst into life, and Twin Peaks was a chosen venue of my education. To the ilk of teenage girl I identified with—obsessed with scribbling in her diary, committed to evading the tight fist of her parents,
insulted by the newfound heartbreak and awkwardness that ushered her into her teens—Laura Palmer’s diary was the definitive account of modern teenage life.
Of course you had to be a Twin Peaks fan to want to pick up the book. Twin Peaks democratically brought, even to us cabledeprived kids who missed out on being part of the mtv generation, a challenging outpost of director David Lynch’s signature you-don’t-know-what’s-going-on style. It was the best, most unusual show on broadcast television at the time, and so I latched on, not understanding exactly why certain things happened but fascinated nonetheless, willing to follow the idiosyncratic, slick-haired Agent Cooper’s lead as he methodically scoured the town in search of Laura Palmer’s killer. On the surface Laura Palmer was the clichéd most popular girl in high school, the homecoming queen who dated the captain of the football team, the good student and volunteer who started a Mealson-Wheels program for the elderly and tutored the mentally disabled. But stripped of her do-good exterior, Laura’s dark side ran deep. Her diary was her beloved confidant to whom she revealed her troubles, fears, and insecurities, and recounted her late-night adventures in lurid detail. And that’s why it was so mind-blowing to read
as a young girl, coming of age and hungry for experience. The diary spans five years, beginning with Laura’s twelfth birthday, for which she’s been given the diary and a pony named Troy. Still an excited little girl, she’s curious and chatty and immediately turns to her diary to pen her deepest secrets
and most intimate thoughts. Much of her first entries are light and airy, yet there’s already an uncertain, dark current running through the pages. She starts smoking cigarettes with her best friend, Donna, an then moves on to taking drags of “marijuana cigarettes” and making out with boys she just met, sometimes two at a time. She gets her period, her breasts ache, and she starts to masturbate. It’s so natural for her to fool around with boys and experiment with drugs, and then go home and document it. But inside she’s still a child in awe of these new experiences, who’s unsure of herself, who prays to God to make things
right and makes promises to be good, still young enough to believe that if she’s good enough the world will treat her right.