Phoebe Gloeckner's realism and a hooker's life
06.02.05 (1:28 am) [edit]I was thinking of Phoebe Gloeckner for a couple of days. She is a graphic novelist and known for her autobiographical work A Child's Life. This is quite a tough read: set in 70's, it is a story of a lower teenage girl's journey and the hard-won wisdom fruited by her narrow survival. The author draws out all the details and truths she found in her ultra realism where is no room left for any dream nor denial. What protagonist has to go through to reach the moment of epiphany is to be neglected by her mom, to run away home, to get hooked up with all the wrong crowd, to get bombarded with the carnal encounter with strangers, adding the finishing job of drug abuse and prostitution,&nb sp;just to escape the origin of the troubled mind; sexual abuse by her own famiy.
In this case, the protagonist Minnie is sexually abused by her step father and getting raped. After running away from her home for the cause, she gets into a series of troubles and involved with an abusive figure after another.
Actually, examining the pattern here gives readers certain knowledges and solutions to get out of the same kind of trouble because what causes it here is very obvious; The girl Minnie falls into abusive environment because she is vulnerable, too needy and desperate. To substitute her need to be loved and to repair the damage caused by the loss of the attention from her family, she throws herself to anybody she runs into in her life, just as a junky tries to fix him/herself by a quick and desperate way.
What puts an end to the magical tour of hell is to acknowledge that she would not get any love from anybody; thus she stops giving two shits on any man but focuses to her own benefit and herself.
While I was thinking of the story above, I happened to find another book, A Diary of a Girl by the same author. This one, though, is more like a novel with many illustrations inserted by the same author. This is not much different from what I read in the former work except certain settings; this time, the protagonist, Minnie, again as the alter ego of the author, is another teenage girl who has a sexual relationship with her mother's boy friend by her deliberate choice instead of getting raped like the first story. After her mother's discovery or it, things get tougher for the girl Minnie because of her mother's indifferent, reproachful and contemptuous attitude toward her. She even encourages her boy-friend to get married to Minnie to redicule her daughter and to nag her boy friend. Under the influence, her mother mocks two for copulating by obcsenity,("You have to marry my daughter because you poked her!") in public.
By the end of the story, she learns to say "I am better than you, you son-of-a-bitch" to the mom's boy friend and moves on along with her academic plan that insinuates some promises for her future. However, to get to this seemingly sober veiw, the girl has to struggle so much to give up the hope and the false feeling she has clung to: she believed to love him and hoped that he would save her from the loneliness. She even wished that he would really marry her when her mother brought it up.
I know by now that you are ready to yell, "Give me a break! How can a girl fall in love or believe that she loves a guy who fucks her while he also fucks her mom?" Well, I want to set the same question and that was exactly what was on my mind when I accidenty spotted this book in a bookstore.
Why can a woman love a man who just abuses her?
Where does the feeling come from?
Working explanations:
When a girl has no experience? When a girl has no good example of grown-ups to show her what can be the right love? When nobody shows what she really deserves instead of jumping onto what just seems to be availabe to her (this case, he is not even available to her, though)?
All of the above seem right reasoning.
The real horreur, and the real moving part of the story as well, is when she calls up to the suicide prevention hot line. She just finds that someone on the other end of a line is a religeous fan atic, who is actually having fun to mortify her and verbally abuses her with quotes from bible. That is the moment when she discovers the universal truth; she can't turn to nobody but herself to get out of the hell.
Can anything be tougher than this? I couldn't stop crying and shuddering for the fear of the sobering realism this author employs. And I have got another reason to cry and suffer for the discription of the confused soul right before the moment of her realization; am I same as this girl to be madly in love with a pimp figure who benefits and exploits me as a prostitute? Am I as helpless as this naive and abondoned soul, little Minnie?
This is what I have been figuring; am I trying so hard to trust somebody in vain? Am still I looking for love in a wrong place?
Oh, how difficult it is to tell how wrong I am.
The rest of the story should be written by nobody but me as a part of my story, "The Playgirl from the Eastern World."