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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Talking to Gloeckner about Minnie does feel slightly schizophrenic: I'm constantly aware that I have to choose when asking questions. Am I asking about Minnie, or Gloeckner?
On our way to lunch at a Mexican restaurant in her neighborhood, Gloeckner needed to drop off a package at the post office. "I'm going to smoke a cigarette while I wait," I told her when we pulled into the parking lot.
"I love to smoke," she said wistfully. "I smoked two packs a day until my kids were born."
"But Minnie doesn't smoke," I pointed out.
"Oh," says Gloeckner, "Minnie didn't start until she was 19."
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Gloeckner has always toyed with the idea of using her teenage diaries as the basis for a book, but it wasn't until a few years ago, after she'd been happily married to her third husband (a chemistry professor at SUNY-Stony Brook), and had children, that she decided to try. "If I had written this book when I was 20, I would've been so judgmental," she says. "I would've written it almost in a punishing manner, and not giving this voice any freedom to emerge. I would've been ashamed and horrified. If I wrote it when I was 30, I would've been too upset. I had my first child; I would've written it in a reactionary mode. It wasn't until now, that I can write with a calmer eye, and I can just let it come out the way it did."
But behind her Zen approach lies a mountain of residual anger: anger at her mother, at her mother's boyfriend, and, especially, at a culture that simultaneously hyper-sexualizes teenage girls while projecting standards of innocence upon them.
"Just looking at [the diaries], I got incredibly pissed," she says. "Sometimes when I would tell people that the first person I had sex with was my mom's boyfriend, they would romanticize that. Some man said to me, 'Well, weren't you lucky that you had an older man who could introduce you ...' It's like a romantic fantasy. And it's insane. Even women would say things like that. So I guess it really pisses me off -- the fantasies built around that particular kind of relationship.
"When I looked around, before I did that book, all I could see was projection and fantasy on teenage girls -- which just infuriated me. And at the same time I'm thinking, how can this man, who's my mother's boyfriend, want to have sex with me? There's something perverse about having sex with a woman and her daughter. It's like incest, whether or not you're related to those people by blood. It's breaking a family. The mother and the daughter become rivals. The mother is no longer protecting the daughter. In that way, it's incredibly destructive. In my situation it's harder to see, perhaps, because the family was never really together -- but it destroys all possibility of that family ever healing and coming together. There's a rift created by this man who's decided to do that." Gloeckner's mother eventually found out about her relationship with her boyfriend -- a friend whom Gloeckner had entrusted with the secret told her -- and she drunkenly confronted him at a bar. "How many times did you pork her, Monroe?" Minnie's mother says in "Diary." "How many? Was it good?"
"Instead of getting angry at him, she became angry at me," Gloeckner says of her mother's reaction. "There was no 'protect my child' impulse kindled. I've always thought that she's never taken any responsibility for that situation. It hurt it a lot. I suddenly realized that my mother was not someone I could trust and rely on. At that age, I still was able to dream that she would come to my rescue." (Her mother is, amazingly, still friends with the man.)
Gloeckner's mother has read "A Child's Life," she says, but hasn't read "Diary." "She said it was too upsetting," says Gloeckner. "In one way she's proud of me; in another way she's furious. She tends to be sarcastic when she talks to me; she always has been. Like, I'm teaching (a drawing class) and she said, 'Oh, well, are you going to teach them all to take their diaries and make a book out of it?'"
"What Phoebe has managed to do is make art out of harrowing experiences," says Noomin. "And they're not just vomited onto the page. It's not just 'Well, this terrible thing happened, and I did a comic about it, and everyone should be interested because it's about child abuse.' It's way beyond that. She's a very evocative writer. She's very powerful."
Gloeckner's work especially resonates with girls and women who have experienced sexual abuse, says Richard Grossinger, co-publisher of Frog, Ltd./North Atlantic Books, her publisher. "I don't think they're comforting stories," he says. "But the comfort lies in having the stories told at all."
Despite Gloeckner's status among other cartoonists ("Diary" blew me away. It had to be the most outstanding book of last year," says legendary cartoonist Kim Deitch), her work, like many alternative cartoonists', hasn't sold exceptionally well -- partly because of the explicit sexual images. "Her work should do far better than it does," says Grossinger. "It suffers somewhat, especially the first book, from bookstores not wanting to carry it. They're worried some kid is going to take it home and the parents are going to make a fuss."
Gloeckner seems unaware, to a certain extent, of the shocking nature of her work. Probably because her drawings depicting teen sexuality (one involves Minnie and her best friend Kimmie sitting naked on Monroe's bed after a threesome) aren't meant to court controversy. "I guess I don't really see it," she says. "I kind of live in this bubble of seclusion in the garage in suburbia, and even when I lived in San Francisco, I lived in the bubble of underground cartoonists, where nothing was shocking. Although I know there's this big dangerous world out there that thinks what I do is shocking or weird, if I internalized that and looked at myself that way -- I couldn't look. I try not to think too much about other people's view."
"I don't think she wants to push boundaries," says Noomin. "She's just doing stuff from very deep inside and she won't hold back. She has integrity and honesty; she won't compromise. If it involves drawing something that somebody's going to interpret as pornographic, so be it."
In "A Child's Life," a comic called "Fun Things to Do With Little Girls" is signed "Phoebe 'Never Gets Over Anything' Gloeckner."
"I was making fun of myself," she says. "I hadn't said everything I wanted to say, (and) I could see very clearly that anyone looking at it might think, 'Jesus Christ, she's writing another thing about this?' And I knew I would do it again, too."
But with "Diary," Gloeckner says she's finished with that period of her life. She wants to write another book, and, possibly, make a movie. What would Minnie think of her life now? I ask.
"I don't think she would understand how to get from where she is then to where I am now," Gloeckner says. "But I think that's kind of what she wants. She just wants to be a creator. She has that energy. She wants to be an artist. I don't think she'd be surprised. But living in Long Island, I don't know ..." She laughs. "She might be very disappointed."
