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Phoebe Gloeckner grew up in the post hippie days of the 1970s in San Francisco. She started drawing comics in her teens and with the encouragement of R. Crumb and his wife Aline Kominsky continued drawing. A critically acclaimed comic creator and medical illustrator, Gloeckner's latest work, Diary of a Teenage Girl, was released in October of last year and has since earned high praise and . The book is a hybrid. A great deal of the story is told in diary entry form. There are illustrations and comics throughout that expand on the story. DTG tells the story of Minnie Goetze, a young girl growing up in San Francisco in the mid-seventies. Gloeckner used her own teenage diaries as a template for Minnie's life, but says that any similarities between her and her alter-ego are just that. Similarities. Not truth. I spoke with Gloeckner while she was in Toronto recently for the Toronto Comics art Festival. Newsarama: You've said that you have become frustrated at having to explain that your book, Diary of a Teenage Girl, isn't necessarily autobiographical. What is it you find frustrating? Phoebe Gloeckner: Well, I think every artist makes art about themselves. And it's only more or less recognizable and you can draw parallels between points in an artist's life or experiences in that artist's life to some extent or another. I'm frustrated I guess basically because I'm always asked that. As if nothing more matters about the work. My work is so much more than that to me. Biography is history, autobiography is personal history. There can be no true history in the sense that people want to believe that there is because it's always from a certain person's point of view or group of people's point of view - it's very selective. If you're giving a history of the twentieth century so much more happened than anything you're going to read in Time magazine in their highlights of the twentieth century. You're never going to get an accurate view of that period, and even if you get down to a microcosm of one person's life it's always going to be a point of view. Either of the biographer or an autobiographer. And it's not going to be like reliving that life. It's not true in the sense that you think there is a truth. There is no truth. We want to categorize things and pin them down. It makes us feel secure to believe that there's a truth and an untruth but I don't believe in it. If you recount something that happened yesterday like you picked me up at the airport and I told the same story, then you told the same story, they probably would be entirely different. We would be focusing on different points of our first meeting, and if we retold the story ten years later, we either wouldn't remember it, or we would've remembered it very differently. Certain things have an emotional impact on us. Over the years they become reduced to symbols. We just remember the points. We stop remembering the context and it becomes imbued with a meaning that is basically symbolic. My mother said I had fat ankles so that means I'm ugly and worthless and that's what it comes to mean over time. It becomes symbolic; it becomes emblematic of how we feel about something, so in that sense, the truth is not immutable. What I'm looking for in my work is an emotional truth and sometimes it's based on my life and my experiences, but they all become fiction. If you want to make a book that people will read there's a craft of writing a novel that involves imposing narrative structure on something that has none. When you're writing a novel, you have to give things closure. You don't have to, but there has to be a last page of the book. NRAMA: So do you think people are missing the emotional honesty? PG: No, I don't think they're missing it, but I'm wondering why they care if it's true. Why would they care? You tell me? What does it matter? Does it change the experience of the book? I mean, when I'm dead will matter less if someone picks this book up in 100 years. I don't know. It doesn't seem to matter to me. Also I think they tend to ask women if stories are true, more than men, I really do. NRAMA: Why is that? Why do you think? PG: I don't know, but I've noticed it. NRAMA: What's important to you about Minnie? I particularly wanted to do it because I think in our culture youth is fetishized. If you lookup teenage girl, you type that into a search engine, all you'll come up with is porno. The teenage girl is the ripe piece of meat that everybody wants to take a bite of, the stuff of fantasy, like Lolita to her muse. I wanted to dash that because it's something that's imposed on a girl and whether you impose the type of sexuality that pornography, or Lolita, does it's just as limiting, as imposing as the idea of innocence and virginity and whiteness and pureness on a teenaged girl. Either way, it robs that being of her humanity I think. And I just wanted to give this goddamn teenage girl a chance to just be a teenage girl. How many teenage girls really are? NRAMA: Have you heard from any people who are going through something like Minnie, or have experiences like that? Has anybody contacted you who have read the book that might be of that age? PG: Yeah, lots of people. NRAMA: Good. PG: And they really relate to it. Of course there were a few that said "this book is full of cuss words and it really bothers me," you know. But I even got letters from middle aged men who said "I feel like I got into this character's head and I understood her thoughts and her feelings and it was like I was experiencing them, and I have experienced them." And that was my aim, to attempt to normalize the character to a degree. I wanted anybody to be able to feel what it's like. What was your experience, reading the book? NRAMA: Reading it? PG: Yeah. NRAMA: I loved it. I really liked it and also having known two women that I dated, Minnie reminded me of them. Kind of a sad, neediness that wasn't getting fulfilled. That part of it spoke to me. Having two friends with similar experiences. Is that what you're trying to do? To speak to those girls? PG: Well, yeah. You start out doing something, writing a book, you have no intention at all. So I'm not really trying to do anything. I was just trying to write a book that I wanted to write. I didn't sit down and say, who's going to read it, as I was writing it. If you think about the audience you get totally frozen. NRAMA: I read Diary first and then I read A Child's Life. I liked reading it in that order because A Child's Life filled in some blanks with a different point of view. I don't know if that was in your mind when you were writing Diary. PG: It wasn't, but I can see how it did that. There are some scenes that are in both, but I made no effort to make them the same or even have one elucidate the other. I knew that because they were the same scenes that it would do something if someone were paying attention. NRAMA: It's like different narrators, telling different parts of the story. Even in Diary the comic parts of it don't sound like Minnie's voice. PG: It's another view, right. And then you do see the other characters. The diary is so subjective, but if you just had that you'd imagine them a certain way, although it's hard to say because you had the comic there. Maybe the comics flesh them out a little better. Obviously it's still a point of view. I was trying to break away from that subjective, teenagers writing NRAMA: Are you going to write more - are you going to go back to comics, or were you thinking of doing more novels, more prose? PG: Actually I want to work on a film next which I would very much like to direct myself. I'm talking to people about that, but I want to make another novel like this. There are two things that I'm juggling in my head. NRAMA: More stories about Minnie? NRAMA: The film that you want to make that's about something else? Do you even know what it is? PG: It would actually be based on this book. A few people have wanted to work on that with me. But I've made films before and I've such a feeling for how I want it to look. My mission now is to do the screenplay to somehow find a way to make people trust that I could indeed direct this film. NRAMA: So, how long did actually take to do the book? PG: Well, it depends on how you look at it. I've always wanted to do that book. As I said it incorporates much of my diary from when I was a teenager and when I actually started seriously working on this book it took me a year and a half. Of literally working 14 hour days. So I was working all the time. Like I said I was changing my mind and rewriting it over again. . . NRAMA: Eating candy and growing your hair. PG: Right. Exactly. NRAMA: Is it finding a niche? It must difficult because it's a combination of graphic novel and novel. PG: I don't know. I don't know. I think actually it's introduced my work to a lot of people who don't read comics. And a lot of the attention I've got is not from the comics world. Salon Magazine, Nerve, but nothing to do with comics. For example,The Comics Journal hasn't even reviewed it, I think they're going to, but they haven't. I think that people who read regular books often have a mental block when it comes to comics, but they seem to be accepting that. But comic readers get frustrated when they meet the written word, on a white page. But a lot of them have read it and told me they like it, but it's harder for comic readers than it is for regular book readers. So I'm glad - I got a lot of writers who I respect write to me and say, "I read your book I think it's fantastic". I went to San Francisco to a book signing there was this writer's group called The Grotto, which is all these regular writers like Poe Bronson, and I think Paul Candler is one. Regular writers writing regular books, who invited me to talk to them. I was so happy. I'm not in the comics world anymore. I've always felt, even in the comics world, I was on the fringe. I didn't fit. I wasn't published by Fantagraphics. I wasn't published by Drawn and Quarterly or even Highwater or anything else. So who am I? As a woman cartoonist you're segregated so much it's so frustrating. I hate that. NRAMA: There're a lot of female comic writers and artists here today, but is that not indicative of what's really going on? Is it still difficult? PG: Yeah it's difficult. It's difficult because they have special shows, like "the Great Female Cartoonists." There're books on the histories of female cartoonists of the 20th century, there's no such books about male cartoonists. You're kind of pressured to define your self as a "female" cartoonist, whereas, I doubt that Daniel Clowes is saying, "I am a male cartoonist." Being a white male, you automatically have the upper hand. It's like the neutral. It's like the basic thing to be is a white male, and everything else earns you another adjective. But I don't want it. So, don't think of me as female. Thank you. NRAMA: All right I won't. PG: Okay. NRAMA: What drew you to the medical illustration, your other life? PG: What drew me to draw medical illustrations? NRAMA: It seems so different from the other stuff. You started cartooning PG: Right. But, you see I have this other part of my brain that is fascinated by science and medicine. I felt that by just doing comics I was denying that. There were so many things that I wanted to learn. There's not a whole lot of intersection between my comics and my medical art, but in my mind I'm in pursuit of the same thing. In going to graduate school for medical illustration I had the opportunity. In art school they had anatomy for artists. Sometimes you'd even do some minimal dissection, but I didn't want that. In medical illustration I could go to autopsies, I could see surgery, I could do my own dissections, I could really go as deeply into the human body as possible, for not being a doctor or anything else. I wanted that because that's what drives me. A constant desire to go deeper into the psyche or into the body, into just being human. I think the two go together. I felt that being just "in quotes" an artist was not going to allow me, or give me the ticket to go and see autopsies. NRAMA: Was that the main goal? Just to see autopsies?
NRAMA: But you've shown them. PG: I've shown them. I don't think they've noticed, but... NRAMA: And you're teaching now. PG: Yeah. NRAMA: So it's a complete switch. PG: Yeah. It feels good to fail other people. No, I'm kidding. Honestly, I'm teaching. It's only the first semester I'm teaching. It's very difficult. It's almost as difficult as having children. Learning how to discipline them. That's my biggest problem is learning how to discipline. I never got any discipline as a kid. So the idea of guiding other people and setting limits for them is very difficult for me. It's a challenge. NRAMA: What is it you're teaching? PG: Drawing 1. Which I think is one of the most important classes if people want to be artists. It's the first college course in art and I think that if you do it well you can really lay a groundwork for a student. NRAMA: I hope you didn't mind my asking about the autobiographical aspect of the book. I just thought you would rather explain why that's not important. It seems like in every interview people are bombarding you with this question. PG: Every one. NRAMA: I don't know if they're continuing to ask because in their mind they haven't got satisfactory answers or if they're trying to get you to admit to something. PG: Yeah, they think I'm coy and evasive and... NRAMA: Yeah? PG: I'm not. NRAMA: But I understand what you're saying. I think you've covered it. PG: Yeah, and I'll go so far as to say: Every act has some intent behind it, like the fact that you're interviewing me. "Okay," you've thought. "Okay, I'll interview her." In a sense, that's expressing who you are, more than it's about me. NRAMA: So it's about my interest? PG: Exactly. So in the sense that one creates his own life whenever one makes a decision to do this or that, decides to take this road or another. You're an artist, you're creating your life, and these choices reflect something about you, just as any artist is reflected in the work where it's obviously about them or about something else. Our choices are about who we are. NRAMA: For example, nobody asks Harvey Pekar whether his stories are true or not. PG: No. No. NRAMA: I don't know why they wouldn't. Perhaps this goes back to what you were saying about people being more interested in asking women whether their stories are true. PG: Maybe it's some kind of salacious thing. They might think "Oh it's a female and there's something about sex. Is that true, is she really like this? Was she this little teenage whore?" I don't know. And perhaps that is somehow titillating. NRAMA: Maybe that is it. PG: Yeah. NRAMA: It's ... I'm trying to think of the word. PG: It's salacious. It's really salacious. Maybe next time I'll just respond with "You dirty thing. Why are you asking me this." NRAMA: You dirty old man. PG: Right NRAMA: That's what you should say. PG: Right NRAMA: But I think that might be it. That it's frustrating for you because then it's not about the art. PG: Right NRAMA: They're trying to make it about you. PG: Right. And I think that my work is never really about sex. That's the other thing. There is a lot of sex in it, but the point is never that. NRAMA: And in reading it, the sex is there, and sometimes shocking, but that's not the main point of the book. PG: No. And the
point is not even to shock, it's just something entirely different.
It's about vulnerability. And trust. It's simpler than that. I'd
be the first one to tell you that I don't understand sex at all.
I think that's why it goes in my stories, it's that I don't get
it. I don't mean to beat a horse to death, but underlying the whole
story is searching to become one's self.
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to Newsarama by Rod Weatherbie 
PG:
What I was trying to do is: In everything that I've read about teenage
girls, books for teenage girls or about teenage girls, I never felt
that the voice that I wanted to hear was there. And I felt like,
for all the Minnies in the world, be they male or female, or young
or old, and there are plenty of them, I wanted to give that character
a voice. And a true voice. So I wanted to make a character that
was as vivid as possible.
PG: It's funny because I wrestle with this myself. A question
that comes into the creator's head obviously is "Am I going to stick
with this character forever?" "Can I do other characters, or want
to?" "Can I make this character every character can I imbue it with
everything, the experiences that I want to talk about." You don't
want to be limited to this narrow thing; you want your character
to be more universal than that. That's the hope. But my impulse
is to make - and they say that you should always go with your impulse
- is to make 2 more books. So it would be a trilogy of this person's
life. And, this format, with the words and the pictures and the
comics, it was really hard because when I started out I knew kind
of what I wanted to do but I couldn't visualize it. It hadn't really
been done. So I didn't have much to work from. I just had to kind
of fake it and just do it. I think the next book might be kind of
pleasurable to have this experience already and just be able to
improve and expand upon the things that I like about that book.
So that's my impulse - to make a second book that's about Minnie.
PG: Basically, yeah. But I also want to make a living. And
the other thing is, in high school I was essentially a failing student.
Very bad student. But I always felt, "Well I'll show them some day.
I'm not stupid." And medical illustration was very challenging academically.
Competitive in the graduate school and so I looked at that as the
chance to prove that I could succeed in college. Just not in high
school or elementary school. So I was driven by that. A chance to
prove myself, to myself and to everyone else who gave me failing
grades. But I deserved them.