About two years ago, I was walking around Brooklyn with my phone pressed to my ear, talking to my mom.

I want to write a book about girlhood. I think I have to.

I had just moved to New York, had just left behind the city that incubated my upbringing, but I felt closer than ever to it. I traveled three thousand miles from it just to see it clearly. To get perspective. Finally living my own adult life, a world away, all I could think about was the kid back in California. I could hear her telling me things, whispering to me not to forget. Not to lose her stories. To never let them disappear.

And then one day, seeing a sullen teenage girl on the subway looking more exhausted than the nine-to-five commuters, I realized that they weren’t just my stories. So I started writing them down.

From sixteen and clutching daisies under the California sun, to twenty-three, walking home through New York City, I tried to tell girlhood the best I could: with unflinching honesty.

Some of you have been reading pieces of these stories here for a long while now. Many from the very start. My questionable impulse for exposing my own life for all to see is not new to you. The essays on this blog—ones of girlhood, memory, and growing up—were often the first places these thoughts appeared. This book grew out of those essays and the conversations they started.

I was tired of feeling so alone in my stories. I knew they were not extraordinary. I knew they were the stories of girls everywhere. So why was no one talking about it? Why is there so much shame surrounding girlhood that when your girlfriends spill something of theirs, everyone scoots in and lowers their voice and listens?

Because it’s all a secret.

I decided to tell mine.

And now, after many sleepless nights and callused fingers and endless hours spent in the glow of my laptop, it is about to be yours.

Coming (very) soon:

This Much Was True

A Memoir