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Lit Pick:
The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner by Sari Globerman for BUST Magazine (Winter 02) "(A) pitch-perfect, hauntingly beautiful, deeply empathic conjuring of female adolescence ... " |
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| Phoebe Gloeckner’s comics are beautiful and brutal. Fearsomely intelligent and emotionally unsparing, you read them through your fingers, eyes half covered, wanting to look, wanting to look away. Transporting her readers in the way only the best artists can, Gloeckner hurtles you across oceans of time and place, back towards the emotional minefields of adolescence. Described by Peggy Orenstein in The New York Times Magazine as “the brightest light among a small cadre of semi-autobiographical cartoonists who are creating some of the edgiest work about young women’s lives in any medium,” Gloeckner’s first collection, A CHILD’S LIFE AND OTHER STORIES, mostly recounted episodes from her San Francisco youth: being seduced by her stepfather, neglected by her mother, and whored out for heroin. Not for the faint of heart, A CHILD’S LIFE provided a visceral punch to the gut, with its often hyper-real drawings (Gloeckner is a medical illustrator) and haunted stories of little girls lost, most famously “Minnie’s 3rd Love, or Nightmare on Polk Street,” which was hailed by R. Crumb as “one of the comic book masterpieces of all time.” Now, with the publication of her long awaited follow-up, THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL, Gloeckner might better be described as one of the brightest lights among artists in any medium. Less a comic than an illustrated novel, DIARY resists easy categorization. On the surface, it is a journal-novel, that quintessential literary apparatus of female adolescence. But because Gloeckner transcribed, edited and illustrated her own teenage diaries, DIARY is really a hybrid: part memoir, part autobiography, part fiction, part epistolary novel. While such an instinctual resistance to categorization has caused Gloeckner “anxiety, alienation and isolation,” it has also provided her with, “the freedom to experiment, to do what I want to do.” And so, with DIARY, Gloeckner has essentially created her own medium, a medium elastic enough to contain the kaleidoscope of emotions and actions that might cause a more constrictive framework to otherwise explode. Evoking with devastating beauty the tenuous balance between childhood and adulthood, Gloeckner addresses and explores issues of female adolescent identity with a tenderness that is never precious. Contrasting Minnie’s aggressive groping at adult sexuality with her childlike neediness and vulnerability, Gloeckner’s writing nonetheless transcends specifics to achieve a purity of emotional truth. The end result is a pitch-perfect, hauntingly beautiful, deeply empathic conjuring of female adolescence, and a "true gift for "all the girls once they have grown." SARI GLOBERMAN |
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