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GIRL FROM A DIFFERENT WORLD

"Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard" is how Poly Styrene began the spoken intro to X-Ray Spex's greatest record, and it might provide the preface (or the epilogue) to Phoebe Gloeckner's impossibly harrowing and tender illustrated novel, The Diary of a Teenage Girl : "But I think, Oh bondage, up yours." Gloeckner's meticulously autobiographical 2002 book encompasses a year in the life of Minnie Goetz, who is roughly the age of Poly and Lora when they recorded that song. With entries beginning in March 1976 and concluding in March 1977, it occupies a parallel universe to X-Ray Spex's quest for I-den-tity, though punk is still a couple of years away from Minnie's San Francisco: There's no definitive alternative to Peter Frampton concerts, just glitter-soul Bowie and transvestite runaways living for midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. There's no sign yet of the scene people like Penelope Houston of the Avengers and Debora Iyall of Romeo Void will make, but Minnie is an avatar of their intelligent, acerbic depth perceptions—where desperation and appetite served as home schooling for young ladies with independent miens.

In The Diary of a Teenage Girl , Gloeckner pays incredible attention to detail: It is the same attention that keeps "Little Minnie" alive and in one piece as she passes through a tilted world like an upside-down Victorian lass caught up in a progressively sleazier anti-Wonderland of bad sex, unrequited love, depression, alcohol, and crystal meth. "My introduction to love" sets the downward spiral in disastrous motion:

In all matter-of-factuality, it happened like this:
One night, my mother's boyfriend, Monroe, let me drink some of his wine. We were sitting on the living room couch. My mother and my sister Gretel had gone to sleep. I got drunk and he kept putting his arm around me. "Look at that silly flannel nightgown," he said…. "It makes you look like a little girl. But you're fifteen right now Jesus Christ I can't believe it it seems like just yesterday that I met you how old were you then? Eleven or twelve, right. Jesus Christ." He sort of rubbed my breast through my nightgown but I was so surprised by what he was doing that even though I half-felt that it was rude and presumptuous of me to think he was doing this intentionally, I backed away because I didn't want him to feel how small my breasts were.

"Rude and presumptious of me" is the heartbreaker, because the moral seriousness behind its mixture of literary formality and adolescent self-doubt seems so true to an embryonic voice trying to find itself, an in-way-over-her-head girl who out of sheer necessity is forced to become more mature than all the pathetic arrested-development cases—partying mother, creepish pseudo-stepfathers, the old shrink who helpfully gives her a vibrator to work off her sexual frustrations—posing as adults around her.

"A succession of jerks, assholes, criminals, creeps'n'slobs" is how R. Crumb characterized a goodly portion of them in his adoring introduction to Gloeckner's A Child's Life , a 1998 collection of her comics and artwork, many of whose drawn-from-life stories served as a rough punk draft for her Diary . An accomplished medical illustrator by trade, Gloeckner poetically dissects emotional states by combining disparate forms in a dense, overlapping manner—documentary novel, diagrammatic comic book panels, exquisitely crafted drawings (" The left side of my room "; " She's strong but I know I beat the fucking shit out of her "), floor plans, lists (Little Minnie's favorite movie: The Virgin Spring ), doodles, scraps—all planted like so many sleeper cells in her conspiracy of the evocative. There's no division of things into melodrama and the mundane, horror or longing, intensity and ennui, shame or euphoria: It all coexists in The Diary of a Teenage Girl 's "hipknifing whirl" as it does in damaged life, which is to say, life which hasn't been socially or artistically sanitized for your sensibilities' protection.

There are dual impulses at work in Gloeckner: to put you in the most immediate proximity to Minnie's world, but also to see it in calm, philosophical perspective—seeing it from inside and outside at every juncture. But Diary neither seems fictionalized nor confessional as such, instead possessed of an unstinting devotion to simply getting things right, to doing justice to the meta-incongruities that crop up in the most unlikely and unjust places. (In the midst of a nightmarishly abused lost weekend on quaaludes, she reports having a grilled cheese sandwich that is the best melt-in-the-mouth thing she has ever tasted.) In contrast to a snapshot memoir like A. J. Albany's recent Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood , the picturesque squalor is seen through less of a self-conscious "Tunnel Rat" viewfinder. As steely lovely as Albany's book is, there is a whiff of hardboiled romanticism—the sentimentality of the would-be unsentimental—to its short sharp shock effects. You believe nearly every word of Low Down , yet it seems to weigh what the audience might be thinking, composing part of itself for the tourist trade, guiding the straight reader through a convincingly waxy museum of Hollywood lowlife. Diary doesn't feel like it's picking at old wounds or aestheticizing them, either, attempting some theraputic catharsis to get all that trauma out of her system. (Signing the 1993 comic "Fun Things to Do with Little Girls" as "Phoebe ÔNever gets over anything' Gloeckner," she used her earlier works to binge and purge all that well-earned rage.) It's presented and framed with only its own terms in mind, using the languages of comix and coming-of-age as a springboard into an emancipation from the constraints of those preset languages, a head-down dive as far into pure experience as she can go.

"Disarmament, I give my arm to you," Lora Logic sang from her own city of lost and found children, "[d]isenchantment, I made this chant for you." Just as Gloeckner's book is a gift to Minnie from her future self, Essential Logic's music was a letter to the person Lora would become, perhaps the reflective woman "Under the Great City," the sensible exile who will not be found out. On Cat Power's You Are Free , "Maybe Not" is followed by "Names," recalling missing-in-action casualties from the warzone of growing up. The song is suffused with regret, yet also with wonder and awe at the things we endure and sometimes prevail over in the course of trauma: Some are destroyed or just vanish, but Cat Power lived to tell. At the end of Ghost World , Enid Coleslaw gets on an out-of-service bus and disappears into the unknowable. In each of these misfit-girl works, the cost and worth of listening for that implacable inner warble is revealed, the immense difficulties of finding, cultivating, and holding on to it are made manifest. They are aimed not at the world at large but at their own private constituencies, all the few or the many Minnies and Enids and those maladjusted fellow travelers Enid ruefully refers to as "our people." The tables are thus turned on the world at large, which is consigned to its very own "popcorn machine," to borrow the late Chick Hearn's pet phrase for oblivion (Enid: "Smothered in delicious yellow chemical sludge"). Escaping assorted fates worse than death, our heroines pursue a dream of freedom, the sound of their own voices. Out of the popcorn machine and into the line of fire, exceptional girls will heed the call of Lora Logic from long ago and once upon a time: "We are born in flames."
 

 
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