We tried hard not to put our personal bias in there. Gillian McCain: Often, our research is based on misremembering. As a reader, and in everyone’s subconscious, you have to decided at a certain point. Neither of us ever said “hey, pull back, maybe this isn’t a good idea.” We just keep going. A book like Please Kill Me, where the drinking and drugging and sex starts up so fun, but then becomes more and more deadly, we just kept moving forward. In the editing process, we often cut two conflicting memories together, and that’s fine.

Legs McNeil: We decided on this very early on-no “I remembers.” We try hard not to draw our own conclusions from interviews or journal entries. To begin, can you tell me a bit about your standards for oral history? I edit Legs' Please Kill Me column for VICE, so it was relatively easy to wrangle him and Gillian into the office to discuss their approach to oral history, Mary Rose, and why young parents should recommend this death diary to their tweens. It came out last week through Source Books (you can grab a copy right here). The book also features Mary's sometimes chilling artwork, which conveys the tumultuous inner life of a teenage alcoholic. It documents the staid ennui of small-town life, punctuated by violent stints of drug abuse, rape, and alcoholism. The book works as a posthumous memoir of a troubled teenager who died in 1999 of cystic fibrosis at the age of 17. Dear Nobody is a collection of Mary's real-life journal entries.

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