Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
In her brilliant new novel "Diary of a Teenage Girl," Phoebe Gloeckner's heroine (and alter ego) falls in love with a lesbian junkie, shoots speed and has an affair with her mother's boyfriend.
Mar 15, 2003 | For an artist known for creating unsettling comics filled with graphic sexual imagery, Phoebe Gloeckner's studio, a converted garage attached to her suburban Long Island home, is surprisingly subdued. Her daughters' artwork decorates the walls. Bookshelves overflow with scientific reference books, "Sanford and Son" videotapes, coloring books. Fluffy pillows cover an oversized chair and a built-in loveseat by the door. It's cluttered, homey, comfortable.
Only two illustrations of Minnie, Gloeckner's signature character, alter ego and the heroine of her brilliant new comics/text hybrid novel, "Diary of a Teenage Girl," hang above her desk. While working on "Diary," Gloeckner, 42, a medical illustrator and the reigning queen of alternative comics, couldn't display most of her illustrations, she says. She didn't want her daughters, ages 11 and 4, to see them.
Of course: How could she explain the "Diary" drawing of 15-year-old Minnie and Monroe, her 35-year-old lover -- and her mother's boyfriend -- arguing naked with Monroe's scrotum in plain view? Or the one of Minnie watching a pimp swagger down San Francisco's Market Street and wondering, "How does one become a prostitute?"
For the past 27 years, Gloeckner has been one of the premier alternative cartoonists, if not the most prolific. She's also one of the most explicit: Her first collection of comics and illustrations, 1998's "A Child's Life and Other Stories," was confiscated by British and French customs officials who deemed it pornographic. Their main complaint: a panel of a young Minnie, Hello Kitty diary by her side, about to give a blow job to a much older man.
"Diary of a Teenage Girl," published late last year, continues the story of Minnie, a precocious and insecure 15-year-old growing up in San Francisco in the late 1970s. Living with a mother who fills the house with her friends and their pot smoke, wine glasses and coke lines, Minnie craves love and attention. Hungry for experience, she begins a tortured affair with the first man who notices her: Monroe, her mother's boyfriend. Hoping to impress him, and experimenting with her newfound sexual knowledge, Minnie starts to pick up strangers in Golden Gate Park and revels in the lecherous stares of older men. ("I really want to get laid right now," reads an early entry. "I don't know if I've made that clear -- I really love getting fucked.") After expulsion from various private schools, she runs away to Polk Street, where young gay boys and trannies hang out, and where drugs abound. Eventually, she falls in with Tabatha, a troubled junkie who shoots Minnie up with speed and heroin and prostitutes her for drugs.
In form alone, it's a groundbreaking work: Minnie's diary entries intermingle with illustrations; comics move the narrative along. It's also one of the most brutally honest, shocking, tender and beautiful portrayals of growing up female in America. This diary is no cautionary tale, no "Go Ask Alice." Minnie is achingly real, and -- despite her out-there explorations with drugs and sex -- incredibly easy to relate to. She loves Janis Joplin and R. Crumb and science and eggs and the color purple; she spends her allowance on candy; she bullies her little sister.
There's a reason why Minnie is so realized: like most of Gloeckner's work, "Diary" is based on her own life.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
In many ways, Gloeckner still seems like a teenager. Her nails are painted black, and she constantly plays with her hair -- auburn, long, layered, with bangs. When I arrive at her Long Island home, Avril Lavigne is blasting from her car stereo. When she talks, she sits cross-legged or back on her heels, gesturing wildly, her huge green eyes widening. She looks like a grown-up Minnie.
Gloeckner was born in Philadelphia and moved to San Francisco with her mother, sister and stepfather when she was 11. She and her sister had limited contact with their father, a Philadelphia artist who had a "nomadic life," Gloeckner says -- and a drug problem. "When I was 14, before I'd ever taken any drugs," she recalls, "he gave me and my sister each this necklace with a little glass vial on it with a top that screwed off. It was filled with cocaine. We were totally puzzled: Why did he give us this? I walked around for months with this thing full of cocaine around my neck." She laughs. "He was trying to win our favor. And I guess he just imagined that would be a connection to us: We're teenagers -- don't we like drugs? Well, yeah. But it was kind of premature."
Although she only saw him once or twice a year, Gloeckner's father encouraged her drawing ability. At first, she only drew in secret, infuriating her mother by spilling bottles of India ink on her bed. Fascinated by her mother's copies of Zap - the underground comic that featured R. Crumb, his wife Aline Kominsky and a host of other legendary cartoonists -- and inspired by Kominsky's autobiographical stories, Gloeckner started drawing comics at 15. "It kind of gave me license to do something about my life," she says of Kominsky's work, "because it seemed to be autobiographical -- although I didn't know for sure."
And Gloeckner had a lot of material. Like Minnie, for three years she was secretly involved with her mother's boyfriend, a 35-year-old real estate salesman who played ball and "palled around" with Gloeckner and her sister. "When he first started showing his interest in me, I was shocked," says Gloeckner. "I mean, I couldn't believe it. But I thought, if he's doing this, it must be OK.
"I was so insecure, and I thought I was so hideously ugly. (I felt) no one would ever want to kiss me or have sex with me, so I'm crazy if I don't take this opportunity. I just felt lucky."
At 15, in one of her earliest comics, "Mary the Minor," Gloeckner began exploring this relationship. "You don't like me at all. I know you don't!" Mary cries, tormented by guilt about betraying her mother, but desperately wanting her boyfriend to love her.
"Are you kidding?" he replies. "What dirty old man like me wouldn't give anything to fuck a 15-year-old regularly?"
