“The Diary of a Teenage Girl” by Phoebe Gloeckner

This book is kind of a downer, but at the same time, it made me feel grateful. It’s the tale of a 15-year-old girl who becomes sexually involved with her mother’s boyfriend, which causes a downward spiral of addiction, mental illness, and self-loathing. As a parent, I am so very grateful that none of my daughters got this messed up.

What I really liked about this book is the way the author mixed mediums. While it is written in the form of a diary, it reads like a novel. In addition, the author included her own drawings, snippets of graphic novel style panel illustrations, and letters written by the characters. So it felt like a blend of novel, diary, graphic novel, and epistolary. For me, that is the book’s strongest asset.

As a regular journal writer, I connected with a scene where Minnie (the protagonist) ponders whether her journal writing is an act of creative expression.

Let’s take a little time out and be completely serious for a moment—my writing in this book has become a sort of habit, and a good one. I do think my writing has improved because of it. Would you or would you not consider this journal a creative endeavor?

(p. 65)

Personally, I consider any act of self-expression to be a creative endeavor. Journal writing, especially if one is exploring the deeper parts of the self, is definitely a creative act. Additionally, any practice that one gets writing hones the skill of crafting the written word.

One of the effects of addiction on a person is a deep feeling of isolation. Throughout the book, Gloeckner captures that feeling in beautifully sad words.

I left feeling like the center of the ocean, deep and quiet. Glowing particles of dust or old dead fish atoms slowly filter down from the top through the water. The sun gradually leaves them. They settle down later at the bottom, seven miles below. Dark. Heavy, heavy water.

(p. 107)

As much as this book is disturbing, it does end on a more optimistic note. Without giving away too much, Minnie ends her diary by deciding to start a new one, which reflects the start of a new chapter in her life.

This diary is almost full. The binder rings can barely hold another few pages but I didn’t get a new diary binder yet. Maybe I’ll go downtown to Patrick’s…they probably have a nice serious-looking black binder with heavy-duty rings that won’t burst open. That’s what I want. I want to get a good one.

I haven’t been writing at all because I’ve been waiting to start a new diary. A brand-new diary is like a brand-new life, and I’m ready to leave this one behind me. But since I don’t have a new binder, it’s just too bad: I’ll have to tack a few pages onto my old life.

(p. 285)

Our lives are stories that are being written every moment, and at the risk of sounding cliché, we can change the story or turn the page any time we want. That is the beauty of life and one of the things that gave me hope in my personal dark periods.

Thanks for stopping by, and have an inspired day.

“Once” – Poems by Alice Walker

I bought this short book of poems by Alice Walker from The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles. It’s a slim book and all the poems are short, so I read through it fairly quickly. Overall, I liked the book. There were some poems I really connected with, and then some, not so much.

The earlier poems in the collection deal with racism and those I found to be the most powerful, especially in the current racially charged social climate. The later poems were love poems that slipped into what felt like self-pity over failed relationships. And while I don’t mean to diminish the pain of a failed relationship (I’ve felt this myself), those types of poems are just not my personal preference.

In the poem “African Images, Glimpses from a Tiger’s Back,” Walker writes:

in my journal
I thought I could
capture
everything. . . .

I love this image, particularly because I am a journal writer. I’ve been keeping a journal for many years and have one shelf half full of completed journals. I know some people don’t like to keep their journals around for fear someone will read them. Me – I don’t care. I know my family won’t read them while I am around, and after I am dead, then I really don’t care if my family reads them. In fact, I like the idea that my children and their children’s children might have the opportunity to look back on my life, hear about the things I did, the thoughts I had living in this strange and exciting period of human existence.

The poem “Once,” which the book is titled after, is by far the best poem in the book. It deals with racism on multiple levels, because, let’s face it, racism exists on many levels. One of the passages that stands out is about a mother’s disgust with her daughter for being in an interracial relationship.

One day in
Georgia
Working around
the Negro section
My friend got a
letter
in
the mail
–the letter
said
“I hope you’re
having a good
time
fucking all
the niggers.”

“Sweet,” I winced.
“Who
wrote it?”

“mother.”
she
said.

As I look around, I see that we have come a long way in addressing racism, but that we still have a long way to go. There is still hatred and prejudice directed towards people of different ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. I just hope some day soon we will all begin to recognize that we are all essentially similar, and that our differences are something to be celebrated, not hated. On that note, I want to end with one more passage from the poem “Once.”

what will we
finally do
with
prejudice

Afterlife with Archie: Issue #7 (Pursued by the Past)

This comic never ceases to impress me.

This issue is written from the perspective of Betty, who has acquired a blank diary and is attempting to recreate memories from her lost diaries as the group tries to make its way toward the CDC. Her diary entries form a narrative that blends past and present, which works incredibly well. In essence, she is using her journal as a way to dig up the dead, or the past which has been buried in the deep recesses of her psyche. It is almost as if she is undergoing a therapeutic self-analysis.

There is one journal entry which really stands out for me:

… they were all there, Diary. The “dead” we’d just “buried.” They were following us–pursuing us… That became our life. Running, always running, barely ahead of the monsters chasing us…

We often think that our past pains and demons are dead, but this is never really the case. We can bury the past, but never kill it. It is always there, waiting for the opportunity to rise and overtake us. This is the root of addiction, trying to escape the past which never ceases to pursue us. And no matter how fast or how far we run, our internal monsters are right behind us.

While this is a horror story and depicts a “zombie apocalypse,” it is the psychological horror that is truly the most terrifying aspect of this comic. We all have our psychological monsters which haunt and torment our memories, and like Betty, many of us turn to journal writing as a way of dealing with our painful memories. This often helps, but sometimes, it just reopens wounds that we thought had healed.

Happy Friday the 13th!

“Into The Wild” by Jon Krakauer

This book has been on my list of books to read for quite a long time. I finally got around to it. For those who do not know the premise of the book, it is the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man who decided to journey into the wilderness of Alaska alone and ended up dying of starvation. It’s a powerful story and extremely well-written. I found it difficult to put down.

In the book, Krakauer uses journal entries, letters, photos, and interviews to piece together the events of Chris’ odyssey into the wild, which he undertook immediately upon graduating college and did not inform his friends or family about. He basically severed his ties to society and decided to live on the fringe. In a letter he wrote to Ron Franz, a person he met while traveling, he expresses his belief in the importance of living an adventurous life.

I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.

(pp. 56 – 57)

Throughout the book, Krakauer includes quotes from writers regarding experiences in the wilderness. One of these quotes really struck me.

Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exaltation.

Roderick Nash,
Wilderness and the American Mind

(p. 157)

I have always found the wilderness to be a powerful symbol for the dark, primordial realm of the subconscious mind. That, combined with the fact that much of America was wilderness for a long time, the symbol of wilderness has become part of the American collective consciousness. It is the wild, unexplored part of ourselves that always seems to lure us.

McCandless traveled around the United States for about two years before finally heading out into the Alaskan bush. There is a great journal entry that describes his feeling as he finally found his solitude in the wilderness.

Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, ‘cause “the west is the best.” And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white north, no longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.

(p. 163)

For my entire life, I always believed that burning had to be the worst way to die, and while I still think that it is probably the worst, after reading the description of what happens to a person who starves to death, I believe that this is a close second.

Starvation is not a pleasant way to expire. In advanced stages of famine, as the body begins to consume itself, the victim suffers muscle pain, heart disturbances, loss of hair, dizziness, shortness of breath, extreme sensitivity to cold, physical and mental exhaustion. The skin becomes discolored. In the absence of key nutrients, a severe chemical imbalance develops in the brain, inducing convulsions and hallucinations. Some people who have been brought back from the edge of starvation, though, report that near the end the hunger vanishes, the terrible pain dissolves, and the suffering is replaced by a sublime euphoria, a sense of calm accompanied by transcendent mental clarity. It would be nice to think McCandless experienced a similar rapture.

(p. 198)

In my younger days, I took a lot of risks and had some pretty close calls. I suppose that is why I related to this book. I could see myself in Chris McCandless. I share his romantic idealism, the longing to live a full life, the reverence of nature, and the love of literature.