As a girl, Melissa Bernstein wanted to be Barbie—blonde, popular, perfect. “I thought she was the most beautiful thing ever, and she seemed so happy all the time.” Whereas Melissa, who grew up in Pennsylvania and Colorado, felt trapped inside her troubled mind. “Barbie was the antithesis of who I was,” she says. “I was an isolated, miserable misfit, and so I retreated to a fantasy world in my head.” There, imaginary friends shared space with a “demon” who harped on Melissa’s flaws, and with thousands of rhyming verses that just came to her, articulating her despair. She would scrawl the verses—dozens a day—onto notepads, scraps of trash, even toilet paper, and then stash them away in a box. “Like dumping the garbage,” she says. “They were too humiliating to…
