Seventh Grade
Seventh Grade is a memoir zine by Naomi Oceans, a pen name for Marina, and was written in 2007, and published in Berkeley, California, USA. The autobiographical story reflects on events and emotions over the period of a school year. It includes poems and copies of journal pages with sketches from that time, as well as quotes directly from Naomi's diary. It is a personal look into puberty, self realizations and emotional growth.
It's a story about first kisses, about blue-haired friends, silence, and local suicides.
Excerpt
Skip forward almost a year: I was in a hospital gown, in a bleach smelling blanket, in a white room, in the psych ward, in the middle of an early October night. The large, plastic wrapped sponge that was meant for a mattress crinkled when I moved and I was afraid of waking the stranger, named Alice, who was now my roommate.
I was there because I hadn’t spoken in over two days. Because I refused to eat and my parents found food hidden all over my room (some chewed for flavor then spit out into ziplocs). I was there because when I was three my mom had explained the intricate scars on her wrists and she now saw my shallow rows of red. Because I was born two days after Kurt Cobain and a Pisces. I was there because I hadn’t been going to school because I couldn’t stop the tears for more than half an hour because I was dissolving because I needed to feel control because cutting had lost its power because I had no excuse to be this sad.
See Also
