“The Diary of a Teenage Girl” is intense. This graphic novel about one girl’s experience of sex and drugs in the ’70s is notorious for a reason. But it’s also compulsively readable, illuminating, and beautifully put together.
Written and illustrated by Phoebe Gloeckner
“I don’t remember being born. I was a very ugly child. My appearance has not improved so I guess it was a lucky break when he was attracted by my youthfulness.” So begins the wrenching diary of Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl longing for love and acceptance and struggling with her own precocious sexuality. After losing her virginity to her mother’s boyfriend, Minnie pursues a string of sexual encounters (with both boys and girls) while experimenting with drugs and developing her talents as an artist. Unsupervised and unguided by her aloof and narcissistic mother, Minnie plunges into a defenseless, yet fearless adolescence.
While set in the libertine atmosphere of 1970s San Francisco, Minnie’s journey to understand herself and her world is universal: this is the story of a young woman troubled by the discontinuity between what she thinks and feels and what she observes in those around her. Acclaimed cartoonist and author Phoebe Gloeckner serves up a deft blend of visual and verbal narrative in her complex presentation of a pivotal year in a girl’s life, recounted in diary pages and illustrations, with full narrative sequences in comics form. The Diary of a Teenage Girl offers a searing comment on adult society as seen though the eyes of a young woman on the verge of joining it.
It’s hard to think of “Diary of Teenage Girl” as a comic. If we want to get pedantic, it’s a diary punctuated with illustrations and short comic sequences. It’s also hard to think of, period. In broad strokes, it’s about a 15-year-old having an affair with her mother’s boyfriend, then disappearing into the San Francisco drug scene. Fundamentally, though, it’s the constant interplay between art and text that makes this a graphic novel in my book. And it’s the hard-hitting content that makes it impossible to ignore.
From the get-go, Minnie Goetze’s voice is frank, intelligent, and relentlessly curious. The affair that stands at the centre of the book begins almost immediately. It’s what surrounds it – Minnie’s descriptions of her friends, of Polk Street, of her trip to a comic publisher’s – that really fleshes her out as a character. An artist and a writer, Minnie is sensitive to odd details. And she’s fascinated by squalor, making her run-ins with the scuzzy corners of San Francisco glow with intensity.
The sexual encounters, meanwhile, come up almost at random, with friends, acquaintances and strangers featuring. At these moments Minnie’s cynical tone breaks down; she’s never quite sure whether she’s enraptured or enraged by what happened. In love with sex in the abstract, it never quite seems to fit the pattern when it happens. Her intentionality and forceful personality are validated on the one hand and compromised on the other. At the same time, her lack of consideration for her own safety – when the shadier characters come up – is a repulsing but also magnetic force. The question looms larger and larger: Does Minnie care what happens to her?
Visually, you can see the influence of Minnie’s favourites, R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky. Everybody’s got big heads and big features, and the intense shading, particularly on the faces, draws attention to itself. But there’s also a fluid, windblown quality to Gloeckner’s draughtsmanship that gets it out of the ’70s. The concluding pages in particular – set on the beach – feel timeless.
What catches the eye as you flip through the book are the full-page illustrations. Rendered with a fetishistic attention to detail, they depict – with no small dose of glamour – the most important characters and moments. A portrait of the “handsomest boy in school”, for instance, is so keen it’s almost embarrassing, sure to capture his freckles and crossed eyes.
But the comics do the heavy lifting, often exploring, in greater detail, a scene that was treated elliptically in the text. Gloeckner uses regular layouts to structure these conversation-based vignettes, and the big heads to carry the emotional content. The characterizations are fascinating. Minnie’s mother’s boyfriend, Monroe, is particularly ambiguous. He’s almost movie-star attractive, but he’s posed like an adolescent. And his expressions constantly toe the line between opportunistic skeeze and curious manchild. Minnie herself is an anchor, her expressions matching the tone of the diary so well that they feel one and the same. Every one of her frowns and sideways glances pulls the scene deeper into Minnie’s perspective, giving us a feel for what this occurrence adds up to for her.
Continued belowThe pace of the book as a whole is irregular, gathering steam and faltering at unpredictable intervals. The book’s ostensible climax – when Minnie’s mother discovers her diary – isn’t nearly as shocking as what comes after, and what really winds up giving the book momentum is the worsening of Minnie’s situation, and the decreasing likelihood that she’ll scramble out of it.
The only real flaw in “The Diary of Teenager Girl” is how fast the resolution comes on. All at once a few matters fall into place for Minnie, and it’s hard to say how it happened, except that time has passed and she’s learned a little. That’s not nothing, of course, but coming on the heels of the tangled, episodic diary it feels jarring.
This revised edition contains photographs from Gloeckner’s teenage years, as well as a pair of forewords. The former have the eerie effect of making Gloeckner and Minnie seem closer together (they’re perfect twins) as well as farther away; the photographs depict someone in particular while Minnie is, in part, a proxy for teenage girldom itself. Gloeckner’s foreword, too, is careful to universalize the story while acknowledging its inspiration in reality.
In the end, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” is pretty much what you make of it. It has been treated as an essay on adolescence, on drugs, on the ’70s, but the closer you read it, the harder it resists categorization. It feels most successful as a character study and as a mirror. It’s a portrait, from all angles, of the creative, brilliant, infuriating, self-sabotaging, triumphant Minnie Goetze. And it’s a portrait of you based on what you discover through her.
