A Child's Life and Other Stories (Paperback)

~ (Author, Illustrator) "THE PiTiABLE TALE OF A MADDENiNG LiTTLE CHiLD AND HOW SHE DiSRUPTS THOSE AROUND HER, AND A GLiMPSE iNTO HER FANTASY LiFE..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gloeckner is a legendary figure in underground comics. Her short, powerfully candid and visually explicit autobiographical graphic narratives vividly re-create the sexual victimization of her childhood and adolescence. Her first full-length book combines new work in color and in black-and-white, including the title story, along with older, shorter narrative comics dating back to 1976. (An appendix reprints her disturbing medical illustrations for J.G. Ballard's avant-SF classic The Atrocity Exhibition.) Abandoned by her father and sexually victimized by her alcoholic mother's lovers, the teenage heroine of "Minnie's 3rd Love" endures a "week-long nightmare of sex and drug-taking" among the hustlers and addicts of 1974 San Francisco. In the ruefully humorous "Quaker School Q-Ties," girls team up to embarrass, and disgust, boys in their grade school. Gloeckner's drawings combine a labored precision with a wild, often satirical expressiveness; her protagonists can resemble sad, angry toy dolls. Undergound comics master R. Crumb's introduction combines glowing praise and a typically embarrassing confession: "I, too, lusted after the young, budding artist-cartoonist."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters," wrote Auden, lines that come to mind upon reading R. Crumb's introduction to Phoebe Gloeckner's largely autobiographical collection, A Child's Life; in it, he assesses her story Minnie's Third Love as "one of the comic-book masterpieces of all time." The old master is indeed right. Subtitled Nightmare on Polk Street, the tale Chronicles Gloeckner's teenage persona (usually called Minnie, but also Mary, Penny, and other variations) on the run from home, where she has been psychologically and sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend. Combining observational precision with hallucinatory perspective, Gloeckner maps the emotional labyrinth of childhood trauma in such detail that she is somehow able to find her way out of it." -- Eric Lorberer, Rain Taxi, Vol. 3, No. 3, Fall 1998

Gloeckner's unsparing memory and painstakingly detailed pen-and ink drawings of family dysfunction, childhood cruelty, and queasy sex make for seriously disquieting reading. The book takes us through the years with Gloeckner's alter ego Minnie, whose childhood is dominated by her overbearing, ogling stepfather and whose adolescence is spent on the streets of San Francisco in a morass of unsavory drugs and even less savory men. The unwelcome sexualization of young girls forms the center of every story in A Child's Life, not to mention the very introduction, in which cartoonist R. Crumb slobbers over the artist ("I'm just like all the other despicable males that appear in these comic stories...I, too, desired to subject the beautiful, intense young girl to all sorts of degrading and perverse sexual acts...") In Gloeckner's hands, the disturbing subject matter translates into absorbing art that's hard to wrap your eyes around, but unforgettable once you do. -- Andi Zeisler and Lisa Miya-Jervis, Bitch, Vol. 3 No. 3, Winter 1998

Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life and Other Stories is as perfect a publishing project as we're likely to see this calendar year: it collects short stories, both new and previously-published, from a period of over 20 years; the stories are consistently interesting and some are downright excellent; and the experience of reading all of the work in one place creates an artistic whole greater than the sum of its parts. -- Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Journal, No. 207, September 1998 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: Frog Books; Revised edition (July 25, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583940286
• ISBN-13: 978-1583940280
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 8.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #233,474 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A frightening and beautiful book, August 5, 1998

By	Consuma "Consuma" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Child's Life and Other Stories (Paperback)

How well do you we really know even our nearest and dearest? How do we project adult sexuality on children, and what are the consequences of this drive? How does an artist take the ugly and sordid materials of her early life and make of them something altogether beautiful, inspiring? These questions are all explored in this big book of Phoebe Gloeckner's "comic" art and writing, which I consider the book of the year. A legend in the world of underground cartooning, and in the avant-garde circles of San Francisco Bay Area high art and poetry, Gloeckner takes on a variety of charged social and sexual issues and, in one dazzling tour de force after another, treats them thoroughly, artistically, with the depth perception of a brilliant novelist, challenging our conceptions of experience, hope, debasement and youth like a modern-day Henry James. At the end, the author seems to have triumphed over her rough beginnings and to have found love and self-respect. W! arning: I wouldn't give this book to kids, but what do I know? Its rough language and troubling sexuality may be just the mirror to their own lives that they need and want and can profit from. As Gloeckner shows us so vividly, we are all on a long journey, and the pain, fear and loneliness of childhood can only be transmuted into acceptance and wisdom through the crucible of expression.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutal and Beautiful, January 17, 2003

By	Laura N Stoland (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

A Child's Life is hard to read but even harder to turn your eyes away from. Her child-like drawings combined with adult events and content perfectly express the difficult adolescent limbo between girl and woman.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Graphic, harrowing, and touching--worth a try., April 7, 2003

By	Booked4Life "booked4life" (middle america) - See all my reviews

This collection of Phoebe Gloeckner's comics is definitely not for the faint of heart, but it's worth a reading. If you haven't read her novel, Diary of a Teenage Girl, I think you will find this book a better introduction to her work. The themes are much the same and the comic art is very well done.
The subject matter is pretty bleak.