Sloppy Firsts (Jessica Darling, #1)

by Megan McCafferty

After all, you can only be in a bad mood for so long before you have to face up to the fact that it isn’t a bad mood at all. It’s just your sucky personality.

So I’m asked all the time if Jessica Darling is me, how much of the story happened to me in high school and IS MARCUS FLUTIE REAL??? I always answer the same way: Everything in the SLOPPY FIRSTS was rooted in truth…until I started lying my butt off. Making stuff up is the beauty of writing fiction. I could never write a memoir because my actual teenage years would not nearly be as entertaining to the reader because I spent an inordinate about of time listening to The Smiths, waiting for my bangs to grow out and making collages out of the cut-out pages of SASSY magazines. Not the stuff of riveting fiction. That said, this line comes directly from one of my journal entries. I can’t verify for sure what one because I filled dozens of notebooks between the ages of 10 and 25 but this sounds like my cranky 11th grade self.