ifteen-year-old Minnie Goetze is dealing with the usual teenage bullshit: navigating her first crush, experimenting with drugs, becoming sexually involved with her mother's boyfriend and falling in love with a girl who pimps her for heroin.
    And really, who hasn't? But even if you've grown tired of coming-of-age tales that involve group sex and IV-drug-related skin reactions, Minnie is the most interesting adolescent you're likely to encounter in any media anytime soon. She's the protagonist of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, an innovative novel-comic hybrid by author/illustrator Phoebe Gloeckner. She's also, to a certain extent, Gloeckner's alter ego.
    Some important things to know about Gloeckner and her work:
    - Like Minnie, Gloeckner grew up in San Francisco in the '70s, was artistically talented but academically unmotivated, was expelled from several private schools but received encouragement about her drawing from R. Crumb, who was one of her mother's friends.
    - Several other events in Diary parallel Gloeckner's real life, but she refuses to call the book autobiography (she prefers the term "totally fictional").
    - Gloeckner's previous book, A Girl's Life, told Minnie's story entirely in images, many of them sexually explicit. (Of particular note was a panel which showed Minnie sucking off her mother's boyfriend while clutching a bottle of cheap wine labeled "Cheap California Wine That Makes Girls Perform Oral Sex on Jerks.") The book was seized at the borders of Britain and France and deemed child pornography.
    - Diary is mostly text punctuated by subtler illustrations, but it's no less frank. (Consider one diary entry Minnie writes while thinking about Monroe, her mother's boyfriend: I need sex. I really want to get laid right now in fact, any time the desire is insatiable. I don't know if I've made that clear I really like getting fucked.)

What's amazing about the book isn't its Judy Blume-on-PCP explictness although you have to admire it but how Gloeckner, through Minnie, manages to transcend time period, setting and gender and reveal some universal truths. Minnie's choices may be extreme, but they're never alien. She lives in a world of romantic naivete and jaded self-destructiveness; it's a place we've all been and continue to fall back into, long after we're supposed to know the rules of the game.
    In this interview, Gloeckner who holds a master's degree in medical illustration and whose other work includes illustrations for The Research Guide to Bodily Fluids talks about sexual hypocrisy, the literary inspiration of a certain Dr. Ira Lunan Ferguson and why the movie version of Diary could never be made. Michael Martin


In creating this book, did you adapt your actual teenage diaries?
The basis for the book was the diaries I wrote a long time ago, when I was a teenager. In making the book, of course I used the diaries, but if you read them all, they wouldn't make any sense. There are a million characters you've never heard of, and everything's out of order. I incorporated much of it, word for word, but I had to write more into it to create a story.

Click image for full illustration