'Notebook Girls' Reveals Secret Teen World

April 16, 2006 — -- Julia Baskin, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen, Lindsey Newman and Courtney Toombs are now confident college freshman. But in "The Notebook Girls," their book which comes out this week, they wrote about the struggles they faced as high school girls.

Created as a collective journal, the girls describe their experiences with alcohol, sex and drugs as well as some of their private thoughts about society, religion, race and self-esteem.

Pollitt-Cohen even wrote about her first sexual experience in "Notebook Girls," which looks like a composition book filled with handwritten notes and doodles in the margins.

"He seems like just a really close friend until these weird moments where I have no idea what he wants, and I just feel used and cheap," Pollitt-Cohen wrote.

All the girls took on issues of body image and self-esteem.

"I'm so sick of not being able to do anything well," Baskin wrote. "I'm just so tired of being plain. I feel like I have nothing to offer in life. I'm so regular."

Toombs wrote about how her weight made her feel.

"It's hard feeling fat in a thin world, and that makes me second guess everything I do," Toombs wrote. "It's not easy to write stuff like that, so please try to understand that it was difficult for me."

The girls -- who were seen as good kids as students at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, and all now attend respectable colleges, including Princeton and Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. -- write about seniors hiding booze in their lockers and getting wasted.

"Wow, so many girls we know are really gross and all their annoying personalities from being drunk stem from wanting guys' acceptance and approval," Pollitt-Cohen wrote. "How lame and sad. I'm not trying to say they suck all the time, I just hate to see them like this."

But they wrote a lot more about smoking pot -- and about the times they got caught.

"It was really pointless for me to deny my state and the parentals got it all out of me," Baskin wrote. "They know I smoke weed, it doesn't mean I'm irresponsible or a failure at life. Grrr… I just hate not living up to peoples' expectations."

"I know I can speak for all of us when I say that our parents are really important people in our lives and we all respect our parents a lot, so letting them down hurt," said Baskin of that incident.

"You worry about your kids," said Baskin's mother, Miriam Baskin. "And she was right to feel that way because she, you know, she knew we were disappointed."

Miriam Baskin and her husband David Baskin said they knew a lot of what was going on, but reading the gory details was hard.