|
|||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||
|
pages: 1 | 2
Fifteen-year-old Minnie Goetze is dealing with the usual teenage bullshit: navigating her first crush, dabbling in drugs, becoming sexually involved with her mother's boyfriend and falling in love with a girl who pimps her for heroin. Been there, done that! Minnie is a fictional character. She's also the most realistic adolescent you're likely to meet in any media anytime soon. She's the protagonist of A Diary of a Teenage Girl and, to a certain extent, the alter ego — of illustrator Phoebe Gloeckner. Some important things to know about Gloeckner and her work: - Like Minnie, Gloeckner grew up in San Francisco in the '70s. She was artistically talented but academically unmotivated. She was expelled from several private schools but received encouragement from R. Crumb, who was one of her mother's friends. - Much of what happens to Minnie in Diary actually happened to Gloeckner, but Gloeckner refuses to call the book autobiography (she prefers the term "totally fictional.") - Gloeckner's previous book, A Girl's Life, told Minnie's story entirely in images, many of them sexually explicit. Some of that material was seized at the borders of Britain and France as child pornography. - Diary is mostly text punctuated by illustration, but it's no less frank. (One diary entry about Minnie's with Monroe, her mother's boyfriend: I need sex. I really want to get laid right now — in fact, any time — the desire is insatiable. I don’t know if I’ve made that clear — I really like getting fucked.) Yet beneath the Jerry Springer framework is a warm, realistic core: Minnie's feelings of worthlessness and misguided sexual choices transcend period, setting and gender. She inhabits parallel worlds of romantic naivete and jaded self-destructiveness; they're places we've all been and continue to fall back into, long after we’re supposed to know better. 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. In this interview, Gloeckner — who holds a master's degree in medical illustration; her other work includes illustrations for The Research Guide to Bodily Fluids — talks about child pornography, her unusual literary inspirations and her definition of autobiography. — Michael Martin In creating this book, did you adapt your actual teenage diaries? The basis for the book was the diaries I wrote a long time ago, when I was a teenager. In making the book, of course I used the diaries, but if you read them all, they wouldn't make any sense. There are a million characters you've never heard of, and everything's out of order. I incorporated much of it word for word, but then I had to write back into it to create a story. So is your work autobiographical? Well, you see, I have a problem with knowing what truth is. I never call my stuff "autobiographical," because I think "autobiographical" implies that something is true. But to me, all that term implies is that it has the point of view of the author. I don't think there really is any such thing as truth. It's all our own interpretation. Memory changes; you create your own mythology, because things are reduced to symbol over time. So even if many of the things that happen to Minnie happened to you, just because your description of events may not reflect the way the other characters remember them, it's not autobiography? |
|||||||||||||||||||
| "I don't know — any better than anyone else — how to define pornography." |
|||||||||||||||||||
