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Highly recommended:
Phoebe Gloeckner’s brave graphic and prose novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl ($22.95, published by Berkeley’s Frog, Ltd). It expands on the autobiographical material and handsome, ominous art in Gloeckner’s previous collection A Child’s Life. It’s the unprurient story of Minnie Goetze, a 15-year old Palo Alto boarding school dropout, who carries on a love affair with a 35 year old San Francisco EST-hole named Monroe - and Monroe happens to be her mother’s boyfriend. This novel, praised by R. Crumb, is one of the most accurate accounts of the 1970s yet written. It’s frank about the lack of boundaries, so common in those days, between adolescents and adults. Yet it also proves why so many contemporary writing about youthful life seems so softball: such books usually gloss over a young person’s ravenousness hunger for experience. Hardly any adolescent writers are as ruthless with themselves as Minnie is, too, and they’re rarely so witty. In a less hypocritical world Gloeckner’s book would be given to teenagers. Don't expect that soon; they just have to live it, they’re not allowed to read about it. —Richard Von Busack February 19 2003, Metroactive
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