Words to cringe by -- and laugh about

Sarah Brown's parents were cleaning out her old bedroom back in Oklahoma, so they called the transplanted New Yorker home to retrieve some sweater boxes filled to the brim with old composition notebooks. They were her diaries, with years of adolescent drama scrawled in book after book.

Brown, then 23, knew her journals required much more than desultory glances. So one night, she went to a friend's house, and over box wine, she read a few selections. Her friend laughed hard. And even though sharing her youthful angst wasn't easy, Brown liked the laughing.

She began sending weekly e-mail to friends with excerpts of the journals. And then, in 2005, she began holding readings at a local bar, inviting others to share their teenage writings.

Now, three and a half years later, the readings are standing room only, and Brown is the editor of "Cringe," the perfect name for a just-released collection of notes, letters and bad poetry by a variety of now-grown diarists.

If this strikes you as an exercise in humiliation, you may be missing the point.

"You have to have a sense of humor about yourself," says Brown. "It says a lot about who you are if you are willing to revisit this stuff publicly."

You certainly do. For instance, in "The Plan," a teenage Erinn Foley, now a recreational therapist in Dallas, comes up with a plot to snag a boy she likes:

Talk to him about twice a week -- inconspicuous

if I call & he doesn't call back -- it counts

Brown allows the diarists to revisit their former selves and provide a note of commentary. Foley writes, "This makes me cringe to this day ... the efforts that my friend Brooke and I went to in order to attempt to secure boyfriends."

Despite the public disclosure of past melodrama, Brown says it wasn't hard to get entries. In fact, she says she got responses from all over the country. "There was enough for two or three books. The poetry alone, you could do a book with."

Oh, yes, the poetry. This is a stanza from a 16-year-old who calls himself "Monsieur X":

You are truly an angelic force that

draws me nearer to you and makes me

advance to a borderline of awe and

insanity.

"There are things that were tragic at the time, like parents divorcing," Brown says. "But what makes it funny is that in the same breath, they're writing about the jeans mom won't buy you. It's at that time when you're still learning how to articulate your feelings."

At the Cringe Reading Series she holds in Brooklyn, Brown says she encourages newcomers to go all out. "I tell them to pick the part that makes them say 'I cannot read that part,'" she says. "What usually happens is that they'll get this accepting groan, when they do and then they think 'I can top that. Listen to this!'"

The readers, Brown says, range in age from early 20s to early 40s (telltale sign: pop culture references may start with Rick Springfield and end with Pearl Jam). With her help, there are other such readings (not called Cringe) in London, Seattle, Los Angeles and Chicago. Brown is also working on a U.K. version of Cringe. "Everyone was a miserable teenager once," she says.

Brown says that perhaps the most cringe-worthy element of this exercise is this small truth: You don't change all that much as you age.

"You realize how you're not that different than who you used to be," she says. "You write in a diary when you're upset about something. Now it's a paler version of how you reacted then."