Diary of a Teenage Girl

    (Frog Ltd., 2003)
™ and © Frog Ltd.

With a unique combination of panel art and diary entries from her story’s central character, Gloeckner constructs a complex and detailed account of a troubled girl named Minnie Goetze. Minnie’s life is a difficult one, even by a teen-ager’s standards, with the usual pressures of school, friends, etc. But Minnie’s life is complicated further by an absent father, an uncaring mother, and her mother’s boyfriend, who takes an unhealthy interest in her.

Her journal reflects her contradictory feelings concerning these tough issues, but she also takes time to record such relatively inconsequential details as the contents of her purse or her favorite candy bar. With abrupt shifts in tone from entry to entry, Gloeckner successfully expresses the turmoil that tortures her. She longs to be both the child she no longer is and the adult she has yet to be, and Minnie’s diary is the perfect vehicle for Gloeckner to portray this girl’s tumultuous life, producing it with a level of detail that’s rarely been seen, at least in comics.

However, she does her job a little too well. Minnie’s life is so realistically portrayed with such brutal detail that the reader practically feels a sense of voyeuristic guilt. Fictional it may be, but the exquisite details of Minnie’s affair with an older man, her sexual experimentation, and her binges with drugs are so unpleasant that this book becomes a chore to read. It’s like witnessing a detailed and accurate recreation of the Challenger explosion.

Few could dispute Gloeckner’s skill at creating such a portrayal, but many could argue over why anyone would want to read it.

— Jim Johnson
Jump to issue:
  NotesWriterArtist