"My truth," writes the book's author, Polina Zherebtsova, "is the truth of a civilian, an observer, a historian, a journalist, a person who has been recording events by the hour and date since the age of nine, a documentary writer."
Polina Zherebtsova was born in 1985 in Grozny and lived there until she was almost twenty. In 1994, she began keeping diaries in which she documented her surroundings. The diaries cover Polina's childhood, adolescence, and youth, which included the Chechen wars. School, first love, and arguments with parents—things familiar to any teenager—were juxtaposed with bombings, hunger, devastation, and poverty.