Estep, Maggie. Diary of an Emotional Idiot. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2003. 178 p. Paperback. ISBN 1887128980.

Diary of an Emotional Idiot details the life and loves of Zoe, an aspiring female pornographer. She is a proud member of Idiots Anonymous, an informal support group started by her friends and neighbors, and she is afraid of messy breakups and melodrama. Her solution is a mindless relationship with a completely illiterate piece of eye-candy. Sounds good, right?

For awhile, sure, but Zoe takes us through her troubled childhood in which she is juggled between different parents and step-parents. She alternates these background chapters of youthful rebellion with the way things turned out in her adulthood; the two converge into an end to everything Zoe has found safe and pain-free but ultimately unfulfilling. Her narrative style is straightforward and almost stoic in the face of an ex-boyfriend named Satan, a group of brooding and at times murderous poets and hippies, and a microbiologist father, adding to the humor of her colorful cast of rehab escape artists and blue-haired writers.

Best of all, Estep does away with neat, tidy endings and tame, slow-starting chapters. By the time anyone reading this book has reached page twenty, they have been introduced to her neighbors and friends: a welfare dynasty, a stripper, twin Japanese fashion students, a speed freak with bulging eyes, Zoe’s lover (the illiterate “Reader”), and a mailman who finally cracks.

Many of the characters in Diary seem cartoon-like at first, but the author shows us that they have heart, soul, and a sense of humor while playing with the roles of men and women (i.e. for Zoe, pornography is not a girl’s enemy, but a calling). Poverty and femininity are a distant second to Zoe’s search for the guts to risk everything comfortable (her sex books, drugs, and eavesdropping) in the name of true, albeit dysfunctional, love.

Diary is an exceptional book. Estep uses multiple stereotypes to create her characters — druggies, the Ghetto Fabulous, lesbians, foreigners of any kind. I found myself laughing and eventually sympathizing with these very real, strange, fascinating people. Estep makes you laugh when you know you’re not supposed to. Her work is clearly not for the faint of heart. You’ll gasp, laugh out loud, and be pleasantly appalled.

— Kristina Marie Darling