It girl gone wild

She went to Peninsula Village against her will, of course: Her father, a cardiologist, said he was sending her to "summer camp." (Vona's mother, who divorced her father when Vona was young, doesn't come up much in the book.) Throughout "Bad Girl," Vona reminds us that she didn't need to be locked up: She wasn't a prostitute or a self-mutilator, after all. She was just bad. She snuck out constantly; she had a stealing problem; she lied; she smoked pot; she dated drug dealers. But after spending a year in lockdown, she writes, she realized the source of her kleptomania, anger and aggression -- her neglectful, abusive and overly permissive parents -- and learned how to deal with her anger without lashing out.

"Bad Girl" is a short, choppy book written in a style so simple that it does, actually, read as if it's been dictated, although Vona denies that claim. And the Vona that we're introduced to through her narrative -- the girl who spends most of the memoir wondering why she's there, since she's not as "bad" as the other girls -- is different from the Vona we see through the "patient's notes" that she obtained from the Village during the book's editing process and includes throughout the book. ("Patient seems to act confused ... it is unclear at this time what is an act and what the patient just does not understand.") The therapists constantly refer to Vona as irresponsible, possibly dangerous, and generally just spacey.

While charming and warm when I met her last week in Times Square, where I spent over two hours with her at the Millennium Hotel's restaurant, I also saw a bit of what her doctors meant.

Do you feel like the recent media attention about you hasn't been focused enough on the book itself?

Of course, especially because of my agent. The piece that [Dechert] wrote was very disgusting and unnecessary and untrue and pulled out of context. The book is a positive story. People are focusing on the fact that I royally fucked up with a boyfriend.

Let's talk about how you wrote the book. What happened after you left the lockdown facility?

I wrote it. I spent two years in high school writing it. Oh, another thing he said is that I dictated it.

Did you?

No. My publisher thought it would be cool to say I dictated it because I'm dyslexic. When I came to him I had a full manuscript. [After we were done editing] he gave me the manuscript and I flipped through the pages. He'd written an author's note saying I dictated the book. It doesn't say that now; I rewrote it. It said, "I can hardly read my book." I was, like, what the fuck? [The publisher] said, "Well, Abby, people are confused because you're dyslexic. I didn't want to say that you were bad at spelling or that your grammar isn't too hot, so I just said you dictated it."

I actually spent a lot of work on it and for someone to take that away from me was fucking nerve-racking, but I didn't really want to come out and say my publisher is an asshole.

So tell me about the process of writing it.

I came out of the Village and a month or two after, I started writing it freehand. It was kind of like a diary. Then I showed it to my mom and she said that it was really good, and she liked it. It took me two years. I wasn't that dedicated to it; it was like once in a while I'd write it. And I wrote some of it in my creative writing class [in high school].

The old title was "Shallow Waters Rising," which I thought was a little less tacky than "Bad Girl." I don't like the title "Bad Girl." The publisher titled it. I was like, what a cliché, you bastard.

Next Page: Vona thinks the lockdown would be a good setting for a TV show: "Itd be like 'ER' meets 'Jerry Springer'"

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