Laura is the book's central character and first person narrator. The book's content is made up of entries in her diary, covering the years from her twelfth birthday (July 22, 1984, when she receives the diary as a gift) and the days shortly before the end of her life in November of 1989, when she was just seventeen. In the diary entries between those dates Laura is portrayed as extremely troubled - by bad dreams, by a strange relationship with an apparently supernatural predator named BOB, and by what she believes as inappropriate sexual thoughts and desires.