The Diary of a Teenage Girl (with music)

The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner is a diary style graphic novel. Minnie Groetze is fifteen in 1976. Gloeckner is an established cartoonist and has taken her own diary and transformed it into a grisly tail of casual sex and drug abuse.

 

 

The book reminds me of this song....press play!

 

 

Minnie gives an unadulterated glimpse into her gritty reality.  The diary spans across two tumultuous years in which she was involved in a salacious affair with her mother’s boyfriend, Monroe; from there she has several casual encounters and eventually she junctures into hard drug abuse. She is parented by her single mother who flagrantly engages in the same derisive behavior.

This book was a hard read; Gloeckner does not give her readers an easy path. Diary style books take somewhat more time to dive into because the events are not always connected and the outcome does not always span full-circle. The diary only spans two years but the amount of detail in each entry in massive. Who says graphic novels aren’t challenging?

At the end of the novel I did sense that Minnie learned from her mistakes, but I was not completely convinced that, even after all her experiences, she had yet possessed enough wisdom (?) to really resolve the scope of all she’d been through.  

This is not at all a book for children - I caution this read for 21 and over