The Diary of a Teenage Girl

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. Minnie hates school and she wants to be an artist, or maybe a speleologist, or a bartender. She sleeps with her mother's boyfriend, and yet is too shy to talk with boys at school. She forges her way through adolescence, unsupervised and unguided, defenseless, and yet fearless.

The story unfolds in the libertine atmosphere of the 1970s San Francisco, but the significance of Minnie's effort to understand herself and her world is universal. This is the story of an adolescent troubled by the discontinuity between what she thinks and feels and what she observes in those around her. 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.

In this unusual novel, artist and writer Phoebe Gloeckner presents a pivotal year in a girl's life, recounted in diary pages and illustrations, with full narrative sequences in comics form.

Customer Reviews:

Diary of a Teenage Girl (Phoebe Gloeckner)

By Maria E. Barabtarlo - December 11, 2002

Ever since reading 'A Child's Life,' I'd been looking forward to this book, and I was not disappointed. Phoebe Gloeckner's 15-year-old fictional alter-ego, Minnie, keeps a journal that is sharply observant, articulate, and funny, without crossing the line into the 'adult over-writing' that often plagues adults' versions of children's diaries. The setting (1970s San Francisco) makes many of the things that Minnie describes matter-of-factly seem jarring when you step back--affairs with older men, 'responsible' parental drug use, etc. Yet when you're reading the book, Minnie's world envelops you completely.Unlike many other (quite believable) teenage characters, Minnie does not even pretend to be cool or detached. She blatantly states her craving to be loved, hugged, touched. The dynamics of her affair with her mother's boyfriend, in which she tends to be the sexual instigator, are fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time. The juxtaposition of the sordid and the innocent is... read more

Never a false note

By R. Smith "9BB" - March 25, 2003

It was probably a decade ago when I first began seeing Phoebe Gloeckner's work in a handful of low rent independent comics. Initially it may have been the intensely rendered pornographic sequences that snared my attention, but there was something about her work that always drew me in further; a kind of downward-spiraling confessional verisimilitude one seldom encounters in any medium. She depicted familial discord and childhood cruelties with precisely the sort of raw, unflinching honesty that seemed to elude every other R. Crumb wannabe on the circuit. And her stories had a way of churning uncomfortably in my mind long after the last bitter panel, almost as though a close friend had revealed a dark secret. With "Diary of A Teenage Girl," Gloeckner revisits the same dodgy terrain of her earlier comics, with strips and illustrations now being used more as a kind of episodic punctuation to the diary-based narrative. The cumulative effect may lack some of the signature... read more

Brilliant, disturbing, haunting, unique

By Hugo Schwyzer - March 14, 2003

I am the first to admit I know very little about the world of underground comics. A student of mine recommended this book to me, and I ordered a copy from Amazon out of mild curiosity; I ended up reading through it in one sitting. Gloeckner's fifteen year-old protagonist, Minnie Goetze, is a superbly realized, multi-dimensional, picaresque character like few others I have encountered in adolescent-oriented American fiction. Though the frank descriptions and visual images of Minnie's often self-destructive sexual encounters may disturb some readers (and perhaps titillate others), the genius of this book lies in Gloeckner's extraordinary ability to capture the mercurial, labile emotions of this clever, troubled young diarist. As a male reviewer, I realize that it is problematic for me to write this, but from my professional and personal experience, Gloeckner's understanding of "American female fifteen year-oldness" is pitch-perfect, even if Minnie's actual life is unlike that of... read more