A Peek at a Girlhood Diary: 'Miss American Pie'

Published July 15, 2006 at 7:15 PM EDT

Margaret Sartor teaches at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Margaret Sartor offers up an account of growing up in Louisiana in Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s. The book offers a memoir of adolescence, told through diary entries written during Sartor's girlhood.

Sartor began writing diary entries at the age of 12 and a half. It was a five-year diary, Sartor writes, "but I filled it up in three [years]. I continue to keep diaries."

Sartor is an editor of books including What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney and Their Eyes Meeting the World, by Robert Coles.