The boys called 14-year-old Belinda Alexandra ugly, so she covered every mirror in her bedroom. When Sofie Laguna did badly at the school swimming carnival, she overheard one boy say: "There's the dog that f---ed that one up." Welcome to teenage hell. According to a new book, Some Girls Do . . . My Life as a Teenager, it is full of young girls. Where are the pretty, popular princesses, the ones who get the boys, the ones who are happy and confident? Not in this book. By and large, it's a parade of sad, lonely misfits.

The good news is, you get out of hell. All 50 adult contributors of the true stories in this anthology have gone on to high-achieving careers as writers: they include bestselling authors such as Nikki Gemmell, Kathy Lette, Gabrielle Lord and Di Morrissey. Some are also known for their work in social activism, law, academia, television, radio and magazines. Now they can look back on their younger selves with compassion and humour. Often, it was those teenage trials that led to success. The editor of Some Girls Do, journalist and author Jacinta Tynan, got the idea for her book while she was working with sister2sister, a mentoring program for disadvantaged teenage girls that started in Sydney but plans to expand to Melbourne. The "little sisters" are assigned a "big sister" for 12 months to help them acquire the knowledge and skills to break the cycle of trauma or abuse and get greater control over their lives.

Tynan wanted to raise money for the program, and after her first book, Good Man Hunting, was published two years ago, she thought she would use her publishing industry contacts to put together a writers' anthology on the teen years. She approached authors rather than simply "inspiring women", she says, because she wanted the pieces to be well-written. Her literary agent, Selwa Anthony, warned her that authors might not want to write for free. But Tynan began by approaching big names. When Nikki Gemmell said she'd love to do it, Tynan knew she would get her book.

One of the youngest contributors is Tara June Winch ("I'm 22 years old. I'm a Wiradjuri woman. I'm a mature-age tertiary student. I'm a single mother. I'm an author.") There's also a piece from a sister2sister girl, 18-year-old Grace Whiting. She has a list of things she wants: among them, to "write words that resonate within the souls of strangers", to "peel back the layers of my subconscious to discover who I truly am", and to "make my father proud". Other contributors, such as feminist Eva Cox and children's publisher Jill Morris, became teenagers when the word was barely invented. And the stories come from across a range of cultures (one of Tynan's few regrets is that she couldn't get any Muslim writers to contribute). But whatever the era or the socioeconomic background, whether the girls dance to the Doors or Nirvana or Public Enemy, the experiences are uncannily similar. "The consistent theme I find is the bullying," Tynan says. "Girls are such hard markers, and that's what you see. Every time a story came in I'd read it and be moved and think, 'Wow, they are finding it so hard to fit in'.

"People say the teenage years are supposed to be the best years of your life, but they are really tough. You don't know whether you're a girl or a woman, you've got teachers and parents telling you what you should do. Your loins are longing, but your head says something else. Almost every story, they talk about these troubles. "Every single girl had these massive feelings of doubt. A lot of them ask: 'What am I doing here? Do I have a future and what is it?'."

And then there are the questions of day-to-day survival: "Who am I going to sit with at lunchtime, are they going to talk to me today? Do I try and fit in with the cool group, or don't I bother?" Sometimes there were clear reasons why girls were picked on: they were seen as different, for example, because they came from migrant backgrounds. In other cases, it's impossible to tell why their peers rejected them. They suffered in silence, and almost never told their parents or teachers. The stories they tell come from the early to mid-teens: if there's a key age, it's 16. At this age, most girls had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives. One exception was Cecilia Inglis, who announced she wanted to be a nun.

"You go to blazes," said her mother. Young Cecilia worried about what she might miss out on: "It'd be nice to kiss a boy before I give all that away forever," she writes. Even the beautiful girls didn't know what to do. Kathryn Eisman was very nervous before her first job modelling lingerie at 17: "I had no idea how to walk down the runway," she writes. "I had spent most of my school days on the track and field team and had only just recently learnt that a lady crosses her legs when seated."

Every girl seems uneasy with her developing body. You can't win with breasts. Kathy Lette's were too small: "My cup did not runneth over." Leigh Redhead was mocked loudly for growing breasts at the age of 10. Tynan was mortified when her schoolmates discovered she was wearing a bra: "Having boobs was the worst thing you could wish on a girl." Some succumbed to eating disorders. At 14, Melinda Hutchings felt "fat and disgusting" and decided to go on a diet to take control of her life. The decision cost her the next three years; she nearly died from anorexia. Rachael Oakes-Ash got into a cycle of bulimia; her mantra was: "Please like me, please like me." A few girls were abused or neglected by their families. Some went through anguish or attempted suicide after the death of a parent or a beloved relative. Jessica Rowe's mother was often in hospital with bipolar disorder.

Gabrielle Lord grew up in a family of six with an emotionally distant father and a depressed mother. At the age of six, to help her mother cope with the younger children, she was sent to a convent boarding school. The too-early separation and physical and verbal abuse from her carers led to teenage years that were "conflicted, bewildering and painful". She became "stuck" in rebellious behaviour. She writes: "The only bonds parents have to keep their children onside are the bonds of love." And in her life, those bonds were missing.

Others turn quite disturbing problems with parents into funny stories: Robbi Neal's tyrannical father shamed her by insisting the whole family become nudists. On the whole, though, the problems are not so much with families as with the dreaded peer group. Surprisingly, perhaps, there's not much sex in this book. Boys loom large: as objects of desire, as bullies, as social arbiters ("You had to wear your uniform very short because that made them like you more," writes Sofie Laguna), occasionally even as boyfriends. But while these girls often suspected everybody else was At It, they were rarely At It themselves. Kissing boys was seen as the great goal; exciting and desirable, and sometimes perplexing because it wasn't exciting or desirable. Nikki Gemmell writes that she didn't find empowerment and grace and mystery in sex until well into her 20s; her only good teen memory was her first kiss.

Liane Moriarty remembers kissing her boyfriend in the train carriage: every now and then he would break off to practise his other speciality, head-butting the wall. "You talked to girls. You kissed boys. That was the way it worked." When they found out she had never kissed a boy, Kelly Foulkes' girlfriends arranged it for her. They visited Maurice, renowned as a good kisser. "My heart was racing, and he didn't even make eye contact," she writes. "He shrugged his consent, and before I knew it, we were lip-locked and swapping saliva for the next 120 seconds, out the front on his parents' wraparound porch. I could taste that he'd been eating peppermint cream-filled Cadbury chocolate."

Other boys have dastardly roles in stories of the high school formal, a rite of passage that invariably seems to end in chaos, abandon and humiliation. (All the desires in this book are heterosexual: it seems no one dreamed of or experimented with lesbian partners.) The few women who admit to having multiple sexual partners in their teens write about it with honesty and perception. "I copied my mother, of course, and had a string of boyfriends who mirrored hers: druggie, drinking pigs," writes Tara June Winch. "Maybe I had lots of sex with lots of boys as a way of accepting my body and who I was. Maybe I thought that if they found my body attractive then it could heal my own insecurity." Emily Maguire had strong sexual urges at a young age, and found the only way to deal with it was to ask boys for sex. She got a lot of knockbacks, took appalling risks and felt ashamed all the time: "I wish someone had told me that I didn't have to choose between being a slut and a virgin."

There's also very little about drugs, but binge drinking seems an acceptable way to cut loose. Brigid Delaney has quite fond memories of a deb party where everyone was sick on the bus, and one boy managed to throw up in the bus driver's ear. If sex and drugs don't feature much, romance seems even more remote. One of the few love stories in the book is from Tynan. She and Simon fell in love when they were 15, and had their first kiss at the Sydney Opera House. When Tynan was 16, Simon told her to look at herself in the mirror every day and tell herself, "I'm beautiful".

She remembers: "He was a rugby half-back and got pissed with his mates, but he loved me like there was no tomorrow and wanted me to see why." Sadly, there was no tomorrow: at the age of 19, Simon was killed in a car accident. The most warmly remembered relationships are with other girls. Not all schoolmates were bullies or bitches. Liane Moriarty gives a positive picture of giggly teenage friendship, and Vanessa Gorman contributes a touching tribute to her first girlfriend, "whom I trusted with my heart". How did these girls get out of teenage hell? Some had their first intimation at school. One teacher labelled Larissa Behrendt a "scatty girl", which seemed to be a euphemism for Aboriginal slut. (She didn't know Larissa had been abused by her grandfather.) Another, more empathetic teacher comforted her when she cried: "You will like university so much better than this place." It was the first time Larissa had ever realised she might get to university.

Others took longer to find their path. But over and over again, the women say that their teenage years, however bad, helped them in some way. "The reason these women are successful could well be because they have struggled," Tynan says. "They think: 'I'm going to show you, I'm going to make something of myself'. A lot of them buried their noses in books because they didn't have friends. Often they think that's led to their career.

"There's a very consistent theme: doing well because they didn't like what they had at the time. It was their ticket out." Some took heart from the things that were good about their lives. "My peers had judged me worthless," writes Belinda Alexandra. But she had a good family life, and her mother told her she was beautiful and bright. "Those who had suffered at school blossomed afterwards." Debra Oswald was a galloping hypochondriac, "a pimply social cripple" and a compulsive writer of plays. She grew up to become a writer for stage and television and an author of books for children. "Every adult I know has been formed by that time, and you can see the teenager they were once you scratch the surface a little," she writes. "In many cases, it's our best qualities - compassion, the ability to laugh at ourselves - which were forged back then."

Or as Kim Wilkins puts it: "Everything that made me daggy and unpopular has turned out to be a blessing." All royalties from Some Girls Do, plus $1 for every book sold, go to the sister2sister program. www.lifechangingexperiences.org

Jane Sullivan is a regular contributor to The Age. As a teenager she was always picked last for the school sports teams.