Come up with three possible starts to a book about what it feels like to be an adolescent girl, and write it in the first person.
1. My name is Monique, and I was once an adolescent girl. I know, it seems impossible to imagine, when you see before you the weathered face of a sixty-year-old. But yes, once upon a time, a long time ago, I was 13. It was a difficult age, with so many changes going on with my body and only a horrid, condescending shrew of a stepmother to help me through it. My mother had run off with some army soldier when I was 3, leaving the child-rearing to a cold and distant father, a career Army man himself.

With my mother gone, I was lacking the kind, understanding female mentor to help me through things like periods, bras, and the hormonal onslaught that comes with an awareness of that previously vile creature, the “boy.”

2. Like so many other days, I started my diary entry today with the following: “My name is Holly, and I hate my life.” For a moment, I lifted my pen and contemplated what made this day different from any other? My thought was punctuated by a teardrop, slowly spreading across the page.

Let’s see:  my dad is either at work all of the time or he’s at home and angry. He resents my mother dying and leaving him the single parent of an -- I can admit it -- difficult 14-year-old. I could make life easier for him, and maybe I should, but why should I have to be the one keeping their emotions in check? I’m a teenager. He’s the parent. He needs to stop being a complete jerk.

3. They say when you’re near death, your life flashes before your eyes. In my experience, I found that to be true. In the seconds between losing control of my car and slamming into a tree, a lifetime of memories replayed in my brain.

There were memories of lying in a crib and looking up at my parents’ smiling faces. There were memories of the world wobbling through my eyes as I toddled around, taking my first steps. I could recall with perfect accuracy my fourth-grade spelling bee, and how I lost it on such an easy word, “inextricably.” But where my memory paused the longest was adolescence, that wonderful and terrible dichotomy of “becoming a woman,” and everything that entailed.