A Child's Life by Phoebe Gloeckner BUY THIS
Frog, Ltd: 2000
A public library in Stockton, US pulled A Child's Life from their shelves, because the Mayor felt that it read like a how-to for paedophiles. Though this was a censoring and reactionary move on his part, on the one hand I can see how a lot of people could be rather shocked by Phoebe Gloeckner's work.
For me, this compilation of comics and artwork loosely based on events in the artist/author's life, is an addictive, frightening, funny and stark piece of work. It made me very interested in the creator herself, something that doesn't always happen when you read comics, and probably not at all the intention of Phoebe herself. In an interview I read with her in the Comics Journal, she spends most of the time trying to fend off the belligerent questioning of the interviewer who seemed to want her to say, “yes, it was me who slept with my mother's boyfriend, yes it was me who was pimped out for drugs by my girlfriend”, because people have a morbid curiosity about that sort of stuff, and because Minnie Goetz, the protagonist of most of the comics in this collection looks a lot like Phoebe, and their physical situations growing up are pretty much identical. And yeah, that's what interested me at first.
But like Phoebe told Comics Journal, so what if that's the case? So what if some of the dialogue is verbatim to the “real event”? As all of you po-mo kids out there know, it is the context and the reader's analysis that makes the story what it “is”. So where the dirty minded Mayor saw paedophilia, I saw a scarily intense child, who seemed to define herself by her sexuality, exploring that adult territory – sometimes recklessly, sometimes tenderly – trying to find a place where she fit in.
Which it seems is nowhere and everywhere. Minnie's “adventures” take her from the bedroom of her mother's lover, to seedy Polk Street, and back to her disfunctional not-quite-middle-class home with her immature mother, and tv addicted sister. The interesting thing about this book is that the author seems to take quite an apolitical stance about the exploits of Minnie. Is Monroe (the mother's lover) a manipulative paedophile, or is he just looking for love? Is Minnie taken advantage of, or does she willingly endure it all and chalk it up to experience? The fact that this book doesn't take a didactic moral stance means that you are able to argue about it with your friends til the cows come home.
The illustration can be scary in it's realism – Phoebe works as a medical illustrator. But this adds to the intensity of the comic – you get to stare into the eyes and guts and genitalia of the characters. You are left with an impression that is haunting and sad on the one hand, and exhilarated and challenged on the other. Or perhaps it's just paedophilia.
MS 23/10/04