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

Gloeckner, Phoebe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1623170346 ISBN 13: 9781623170349

Publisher: North Atlantic Books, 2015

Synopsis

First released in 2002, this provocative, critically acclaimed novel is now a major motion picture starring Bel Powley, Kristen Wiig, and Alexander Skarsgård.
 
“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. After losing her virginity to her mother's boyfriend, Minnie pursues a string of sexual encounters (with both boys and girls) while experimenting with drugs and developing her talents as an artist. Unsupervised and unguided by her aloof and narcissistic mother, Minnie plunges into a defenseless, yet fearless adolescence.
 
While set in the libertine atmosphere of 1970s San Francisco, Minnie's journey to understand herself and her world is universal: this is the story of a young woman troubled by the discontinuity between what she thinks and feels and what she observes in those around her. Acclaimed cartoonist and author Phoebe Gloeckner serves up a deft blend of visual and verbal narrative in her complex presentation of a pivotal year in a girl's life, recounted in diary pages and illustrations, with full narrative sequences in comics form. 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.
 
This edition has been updated by the author with an introduction reflecting on the book's critical reception and value as diary or novel, historical document or work of art. Also included in this revised edition are supplementary photographs and illustrations from the author's childhood, including some of her own diary entries.

"Phoebe Gloeckner... is creating some of the edgiest work about young women's lives in any medium."—The New York Times
 
"One of the most brutally honest, shocking, tender and beautiful portrayals of growing up female in America."—Salon
 
"It's the most honest depiction of sexuality in a long, long time; as a meditation on adolescence, it picks up a literary ball that's been only fitfully carried after Salinger."—Nerve.com

About this title

About the Author:

PHOEBE GLOECKNER's comics first appeared in underground publications when she was in her teens. She is the author of the critically acclaimed works A Child's Life and Other Stories and The Diary of a Teenage Girl, as well as the illustrator of the annotated edition of J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. The recipient of an Inkpot Award (2000) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), Gloeckner currently teaches at the University of Michigan's School of Art & Design.

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: North Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1623170346
• ISBN 13: 9781623170349
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320