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258th out of 1,514 books
—
3,102 voters
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
So begins the wrenching diary of Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl longing for love and acceptance and struggling with her own precocious sexuality. Minnie hates school and she wants to be an artist, or maybe a speleologist, or a bartender. She sleeps with her mother's boyfriend, and yet is too shy to talk with boys at school. She forges her way through adolescence, u...more
Paperback, 320 pages
Published
November 14th 2002
by Frog Books
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This is so different from your average growing-up story, so startling, so true - and also so painful to watch bad choices on top of bad choices driven by the need to be loved - that I'm giving it five stars even though I couldn't read every word of it. It was like watching a slow motion train wreck; sometimes I had to turn my head. The graphics are simply amazing in their skill and their honesty. It takes place in San Francisco in the 1970's and it's dead-on - I was there. I feel like I've spent...more
Feb 11, 2008
Stephanie
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
tormented teens
Recommended to Stephanie by:
Beth
I finally got to read this book, thanks to Beth's generous loan. I'm so glad I read this. Phoebe Gloeckner's tale of a 15 year old girl growing up in San Francisco brought back a lot of memories of my own teen years, good and bad. I especially enjoy how the author doesn't moralize about the protagonist's situation. It's simply presented in stark terms, just as the character would have experienced life.
In many ways, Minnie doesn't have the capacity to say, "Whoa! This situation is really fucked...more
In many ways, Minnie doesn't have the capacity to say, "Whoa! This situation is really fucked...more
I thoroughly enjoyed Diary of a Teenage Girl. It has been what I was searching out for some time. I have an intense interest in the human condition but many of the recent novels I have picked up were too severe for my current state of mind. I have picked up and put down authors ranging from Lucy Greeley to Chuck Palahniuk, but Gloeckner really captured my attention with her raw account of what it was like to be a 15 year old girl with an alcoholic mother in CA during the end of the sexual revolu...more
Wow. This book is pretty intense. Kind of like a more artsy and less secretly-produced-by-the-catholic-church Go Ask Alice only replete with really cool illustrations and full-scale narrative lapses into comic panels. The whole book is written as though it was the diary of a troubled, drug-addled, sexually promiscuous teenage girl, only the situation is complex - she is full of teen angst, but she is also talented, bright and sympathetic. She has a secret relationship with her mother's boyfriend...more
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Taken from Amazon.com:
Gloeckner's latest, a combination of comics and prose, follows the sexual misadventures and coming-of-age of Minnie Goetze, a troubled teenager very much reminiscent of Gloeckner, as she stumbles toward adulthood in 1970s San Francisco. Minnie's diary details the loss of her virginity to Monroe, her mother's less than devoted boyfriend. She falls in love with him, though he continues to sleep with Minnie's self-absorbed, drunken mother. A hellish adolescence follows: Minnie...more
Gloeckner's latest, a combination of comics and prose, follows the sexual misadventures and coming-of-age of Minnie Goetze, a troubled teenager very much reminiscent of Gloeckner, as she stumbles toward adulthood in 1970s San Francisco. Minnie's diary details the loss of her virginity to Monroe, her mother's less than devoted boyfriend. She falls in love with him, though he continues to sleep with Minnie's self-absorbed, drunken mother. A hellish adolescence follows: Minnie...more
Having read Gloeckner's previous collection "A Child's Life" which tells of the Minnie character's life as a little girl, it is easy to see where the stage has been set for things which transpire when Minnie is a teenager. The stepfather Pascal, a central, looming figure in the earlier book, is now divorced from Minnie's mother and reduced to writing meandering and vaguely desperate letters to Minnie in a bid to retain some sort of "fatherly" influence in her life, but his wreckage is apparent....more
Holy shit, what a book! Not a young adult novel in the traditional sense but a really complex, densely textured coming of age novel that explores some seriously complicated dynamics between kids and adults. Also a really sympathetic look at promiscuity and the ways in which it might begin as kind of a pathology in very young girls but it is by no means any kind of life sentence. I've always been frustrated by the ways in which girls' books are already at a disadvantage because the male gaze is t...more
I have to say maybe I'm too old to "get" this book.
About a teenage girl and her issues with sex and drugs and life in general....
So begins the wrenching diary of Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl longing for love and acceptance and struggling with her own precocious sexuality. Minnie hates school and she wants to be an artist, or maybe a speleologist, or a bartender. She sleeps with her mother's boyfriend, and yet is too shy to talk with boys at school. She forges her way through adolescenc...more
About a teenage girl and her issues with sex and drugs and life in general....
So begins the wrenching diary of Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl longing for love and acceptance and struggling with her own precocious sexuality. Minnie hates school and she wants to be an artist, or maybe a speleologist, or a bartender. She sleeps with her mother's boyfriend, and yet is too shy to talk with boys at school. She forges her way through adolescenc...more
I am not sure I like this book. Have you seen the movie Towelhead? It has to do w/a Middle Eastern girl coming of age in suburbs of TX during the messy transition from the 80s to the 90s, finding sexual awakening w/another teenager, but also getting fondled and molested by a blonde-haired, blue eyed pedophile neighbor who also is involved w/the military? Anyway, the unease with the sexual desires of adolescent girls stems from this book-w/an affair w/a much older male (pretty much teen molestati...more
3:17 PM The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner is really good
The voice of Minnie Goetz at age 15 is so precise, so immediate, that I believe Gloeckner had to have used her own exact diary entries
3:18 PM and if we can assume a lot of the narrative is autobiographical, then that means Gloeckner had a pretty fucked up childhood + teenage years, but as an adult, she seems to be in a better place now. Married with a couple kids, an Associate Professor at Univ. of Michigan
3:20 PM I heard abo...more
The voice of Minnie Goetz at age 15 is so precise, so immediate, that I believe Gloeckner had to have used her own exact diary entries
3:18 PM and if we can assume a lot of the narrative is autobiographical, then that means Gloeckner had a pretty fucked up childhood + teenage years, but as an adult, she seems to be in a better place now. Married with a couple kids, an Associate Professor at Univ. of Michigan
3:20 PM I heard abo...more
May 10, 2007
kate Gauldin
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
those who are open minded and not prone to outrage
Highly disturbing, shocking, and unapologetic. The climax to an adolescent literature class I took, this graphic novel made me sick to my stomach at times for its honesty, and while it is nowhere near the story of my adolescence, it is the story of many girls'. Our professor left us with the question, "Would you let your child read this book?" and I was surprised with myself that I couldn't find an answer.
I stopped by Barnes and Noble yesterday, intending to take a quick spin around before grabbing some groceries next door. I made the lucky mistake of picking up this book, and two hours later, I walked out in a reading-induced daze. This book is a delightful, disturbing, enlightening, spot-on, refreshing, hilarious, terrible, and totally worthwhile glimpse into the complexities of coming-of-age as a woman.
May 03, 2010
MariNaomi
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommended to MariNaomi by:
Melaina Eller
Shelves:
graphic
Wow. This book was so many things, disturbing being the most prominent. Less obviously, the narrator is sweet, sociopathic, romantic, completely self-consumed, bitter, hopeful... Gloeckner's writing unapologetically captures the aching dramaticism of adolescence, as well as the potential downward spiral of drug overuse, and then tops it off with the resilience of youth. My crazy teens weren't nearly this interesting or dysfunctional, but I could identify with bits here and there, particularly th...more
My first exposure to Phoebe Gloeckner's work was about 12 years ago, when I was still a young teenage girl trying to figure out how to cope with my sexuality. Gloeckner's protagonists are exploited and abused, but they also have great verve and agency--a truthful but very confusing mix of attributes.
As an adult "The Diary of a Teenage Girl" appeals to me further. The combination of raw teenage diary entries combined with comics that are drawn from a retrospective adult perspective captured my c...more
As an adult "The Diary of a Teenage Girl" appeals to me further. The combination of raw teenage diary entries combined with comics that are drawn from a retrospective adult perspective captured my c...more
A pretty amazing document of words, delivered in a voice that feels more or less pitch-perfect-- flat, affectless except when it's not, profane and good, along with comix that supplement and sometimes but not always take up the story.... This is a really solid piece of work, one I used to hear about a lot when it came out but which I think has maybe been forgotten under the avalanche of other, "all-picture" versions like Ariel Shrag's and Alison Bechdel's.
My one concern is the ending, which I d...more
My one concern is the ending, which I d...more
This is a gem of a book. It is emotional and devastating and, at times, I wondered if Phoebe Gloeckner stole my own journal for reference. Meant for girls, but can double for boys, this is the story of Minnie Goetze ("pronounce 'Getz' like the candy") and one year of her life as she grows into her identity in San Francisco, near Polk Street. The story devices used in this book are truly entertaining and simply "cool".
The story is told through diary entries, a few illustrations dot the story. For...more
The story is told through diary entries, a few illustrations dot the story. For...more
One of my favorite books. Raw portrait of an introspective and lost teenage girl experimenting with sex and drugs in 70's San Francisco. This is somewhat based on Gloeckner's life growing up in the city. As a Bay Area local I can recognize many of the streets and views in the book. The author is also an alumni of my school, SF State. Half of the book is told in comic form. The illustrations of the characters, remind of caricatures with their exaggerated, innocent features. Visually this novel is...more
This book was particularly interesting to me because it takes place in San Francisco, where I live. Even though it is set in the 70s, many of the places mentioned are still around. The narrator is fictional, but the author has admitted to including many biographical elements. The line between Minnie and Phoebe is blurry. You may expect this to be some innocent teenage story from the title, but it's the complete opposite. Minnie's experiences are often shocking, but I still found something appeal...more
I wouldn't say I exactly recommend this book, but it is interesting, especially for its mixed-media format (comic book and diary entry -- is that like an epistolary novel to yourself?) It's very true to the journal-entry conceit, eschewing narrative arc and all that good crap that workshop beats into you. This makes it maybe not as effective as a novel, but it's cool as a piece of work. And hats off to Gloeckner for writing something that reflects the kinds of crazy things that teenagers actuall...more
When I first ordered this book, I thought it was a graphic novel, and then I received it to discover that it's part diary with illustrations and short graphic novel stories interspersed throughout. At first, I thought, what the heck is this? Pick a genre and stick to it! But then I read it, and I was actually pleasantly surprised at how the genre mixing complimented and informed one another. In the diary, you get what you would expect from a teenage girl's perspective: her worries, fears, obsess...more
so, i guess this is the autobiographical account of the author's troubled teendom in the 70s, the child of a divorced mom who seems to be dating a series of pretty questionable dudes. there's plenty of sex, drugs, & rock & roll, pretty much all of which skeeved me out to the max. not to wreck it, but the protag at some point bones her mom's boyfriend. does it gets any grosser than that? i mean, it's consensual & all (as consensual as it can be between a teenage girl & her mom's 7...more
Hard to read -- painful, at times. I was a teenage girl once, though not as troubled as our narrator, thankfully. The tawdriest parts of my own diaries pale in comparison. Some parts of this book rang so true that I had to put it down for a moment to react. Other parts made me wonder if the author was just trying to pile as much horrible shit onto her character as she possibly could, for dramatic effect. But then, I'm sure there are plenty of real girls who had it worse.
And I don’t like it so far. Not at all. I think it is one of the stupidest books I have ever attempted to read. I like the format, part diary, part graphic novel. However, the content is horrendous. Im not a prude in any sense, but I was never like this as a 15 year old and don’t know many girls who were. I think that part of my dislike does stem from the fact that I do not relate in any way to the main character, Minnie
I found a lot of this book really, really disturbing. It's beautifully written and beautifully drawn, but so distasteful that I had to put it down frequently and walk away. As the mother of a 15-year-old daughter I wanted to find Minnie and hug her, tell her things would be okay. And then find her mother and slap her right upside the head. And then start worrying about all the other Minnies out there.
I really wanted this to be a histrionic, overblown, obnoxious moral tale about what happens when good girls go bad. I wanted it to be another San Francisco counterculture cliche. It turned out to be an uncomfortably evocative narrative of who we've all been and/or what we've all experienced. Deeply upsetting but not quite depressing, warm yet totally frightening.
i have extremely mixed feelings on this book. while i absolutely admire the writer's style and intent (i.e. give voice to a young girl's coming of age experience) this book was not a pleasant read. the main character, minnie, is very likable but it was very hard for me to read about her illicit affair with her mother's boyfriend. as well as with her best friend. as well as with a stranger in a park. etc. i understand that not every young woman has identical experiences, and i am grateful for glo...more
When I began reading this thinly veiled autobiographical graphic novel, the young protagonist reminded me a lot of my teenage self. She has a strained relationship with her mother, and is very uncomfortable with growing into a woman. She is angry and depressed, doesn't really like her friends and relates only to her idols. But she deals with her problems in a much different way than I did. Perhaps it's because her parents divorced early, and her stepfather is a creep and a pedophile, (actually,...more
This is a book that is very easy to get caught up in. The illustrations are really great. I love 1970's San Francisco. I feel like I know this person when I'm reading this book. It can be disturbing, but it feels very real. I want to hug Minnie and be her friend, and tell her she's so talented and beautiful.
This collection of names changed so no one can sue excerpts from Gloeckner's circa 1970s teen diary interwoven with brief graphic novel style interludes (I guess to illustrate or expand upon things only alluded to in the diary pages) is compelling & undeniably well done in a gritty downbeat way, but it took me ages to get through it because the adults that completely failed this poor kid on EVERY CONCEIVABLE LEVEL got me so irate and upset I had to keep putting it down and taking long breaks...more
The Diary of a Teenage Girl has meant so much to me since I first read it two years ago at the age of 14, a time where everything wasn't going so great for me. I very easily resided with Minnie's wander and sadness. Gloeckner's work is the best I have ever seen and Diary continues to be one of my favorites.
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