Word: gloeckners
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...Principle among her discombobulating strategies is the strange, muddy mix of signals about the authenticity of the work. Ostensibly the book is fiction, written by a girl named "Minnie Goetze," the character Gloeckner has used in nearly all her stories. Though Minnie looks exactly like her creator, Gloeckner has insisted in interviews that she is not Minnie. In spite of this the cover features a photo of the teenaged Gloeckner, noted as "the real Minnie Goetze" in the illustration list. Both this and the subtitle, "an account in words and pictures," rather than "a novel," clearly point towards straight autobiography...
...with Monroe, Minnie writes increasing desultory passages. In August she writes, "I wish everyone was as horny as I am ... I love cute guys, I really do appreciate them." By October it has turned to, "Everything is so loveless and mediocre." Yet, like all the best works of art, Gloeckner leaves out any moralizing or characterizing of the relationship. The audience must provide...
...words and pictures," as the subtitle says. Mostly text, it reads like the diary of an artistically precocious teenager, including copious illustrations and occasionally turning into full-on comix. Some of the art is original to the time, but most of the it has been added by the adult Gloeckner...
...Gloeckner makes her living as a medical textbook illustrator, giving her late artwork an exacting eye for detail. Most of the singular illustrations are portraits of the book's characters. The comix sections either explicate events the diary only alludes to, as when Minnie and her best friend meet an older man for sex, or else they imagine scenes Minnie was not privy to, as when her mother confronts Monroe on her suspicions about the relationship with Minnie. Adding a different layer of challenge to the book, the switching from prose to comix feels like jumping between the sauna...
...Phoebe Gloeckner's deliberately tough, difficult "Diary of a Teenage Girl," feels totally authentic because it is. As such, it makes such sanitized, safe books about teen's "real" problems, the Judy Blume-type material, seem utterly out of touch. Ironically, thanks to its uncompromisingly explicit details of rape and drug abuse, "Diary" may be completely inappropriate for anyone under 18. But for everyone else, "Diary of a Teenage Girl" reveals a reality that I fear more teenagers than we know have experienced...