The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures - Softcover

Gloeckner, Phoebe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1583940634 ISBN 13: 9781583940631

Publisher: Frog Books, 2002

Synopsis

"I don't remember being born. I was a very ugly child. My appearance has not improved so I guess it was a lucky break when he was attracted by my youthfulness." So begins the wrenching diary of Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl longing for love and acceptance and struggling with her own precocious sexuality. Minnie hates school and she wants to be an artist, or maybe a speleologist, or a bartender. She sleeps with her mother's boyfriend, and yet is too shy to talk with boys at school. She forges her way through adolescence, unsupervised and unguided, defenseless, and yet fearless.

 

The story unfolds in the libertine atmosphere of the 1970s San Francisco, but the significance of Minnie's effort to understand herself and her world is universal. This is the story of an adolescent troubled by the discontinuity between what she thinks and feels and what she observes in those around her. The Diary of a Teenage Girl offers a searing comment on adult society as seen though the eyes of a young woman on the verge of joining it.

 

In this unusual novel, artist and writer Phoebe Gloeckner presents a pivotal year in a girl's life, recounted in diary pages and illustrations, with full narrative sequences in comics form.

About this title

About the Author:

Phoebe Gloeckner was born in Philadelphia and raised in San Francisco. Her comics first appeared in underground publications when she was in her teens. A critically acclaimed collection of her comics, paintings, and etchings, A Child's Life and Other Stories, was published in 1998. In addition to paintings and comics, she has made award-winning short films.

From Publishers Weekly:

Gloeckner's latest, a combination of comics and prose, follows the sexual misadventures and coming-of-age of Minnie Goetze, a troubled teenager very much reminiscent of Gloeckner, as she stumbles toward adulthood in 1970s San Francisco. Minnie's diary details the loss of her virginity to Monroe, her mother's less than devoted boyfriend. She falls in love with him, though he continues to sleep with Minnie's self-absorbed, drunken mother. A hellish adolescence follows: Minnie's kicked out of various schools, has promiscuous sex and ends up on the streets, strung out and obsessed with a young lesbian who pimps her out for more drugs. Gloeckner mined these same experiences in her award-winning graphic novel A Child's Life. In this work, though, Minnie's story is told through a combination of prose, illustrations and comics, capturing the confused inner dialogue of a precocious, attention-starved girl with a talent for drawing. This is both the book's strength and its weakness. Unlike the highly distilled emotions of A Child's Life, the prose descriptions of Minnie's experiences are engaging but formless, bleeding onto the page. The crisp details of Gloeckner's b&w drawings help by grounding the stories in a convincing realism, but they're obviously the product of an older, more judgmental, but also more reflective, self. More affecting are the casual teenage doodlings and comics that Gloeckner includes periodically throughout the book. Though not related directly to the story, they seem a more honest depiction of the necessary but casual self-reflection that a diary can help keep alive.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Frog Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1583940634
• ISBN 13: 9781583940631
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312