The sad teenage stud must tend to his ruinous habit. Before school, he heads to the supermarket to buy Pepsi in bulk. “Same as usual, huh?” says the cashier. When he returns home, he arranges the cans of cola in the fridge, before taking three into bed with him, where he daydreams of living in Arizona or Hawaii, doing nothing except sinking three hundred sodas a day—a freedom apparently unattainable in his home city of Malibu. This reverie is cut short by thoughts of his ex, a cheerleader named Peggy, whose name is scrawled ten times in pink paint across his bedroom door. He tries to drown out the thought of her by guzzling the drink he has christened “the high life.”

So begins June-Alison Gibbons’ The Pepsi-Cola Addict, originally published by a vanity press in 1981, when the author was just 16.…