Laura Palmer

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. All these experiences contrast with Laura's simultaneous beliefs that she should act and/or be perceived as a "good girl", following the example of her best friend Donna. Her efforts to act on those beliefs, however, are undermined by her beginning to enjoy the sexual side of herself, which in turn begins as...