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I'm just as appalled as you are that this is listed on my "read" shelf. GR needs a "looked at every single page" shelf in order to better classify books such as this.

Taken at face value, this collection of confessional postcards is poignant, disturbing, and beautiful in equal parts. However, the same cynicism that causes me to assume that everyone on the Internet (who is not on my GR friends list) is in actuality a hairy, swaybacked, middle-aged man by the name of Lou also pulls me in the direction of doubting the validity of some of these confessions.

"He's an arty type...no principles." - W.S. Burroughs

During junior high, the high school psychology classes would often visit in order to give us anonymous research surveys. My dumb buddies and I were the self-appointed yes-men of Mrs. Wilson's third period English class. Whatever the question, we had zestfully partaken.

Freebased cocaine? Yep.
Sniffed glue? Just before soccer practice last Tuesday.
Sex? Do you even have to ask? (Luckily this was the Bible Belt in the mid-80's, so it was still bad form to broach the subject with seventh graders of collaboration versus solo project...)

Assuming that our questionnaires were not quickly trashed, I would have loved to have seen some of those research papers. Most likely they hypothesized that the seventh grade English class at T.S. Hill Middle School was comprised mainly of the understudies of Rick James, the Marquis de Sade, and late period Elvis Presley. Did anyone else ever do this? Why the hell did we? Two reasons I think:
1) We thought that we would look cool to the high schoolers (through osmosis, evidently, as it was a secret questionnaire).
2) It was a lot of fun.

I have great difficulty dismissing the possibility that the submitters for this book were not operating under similar motives.

Regardless, this is an interesting book. I suggest at least a once-over flip through.