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May 05, 2006
My Funny Valenshtein: Girl Stories by Lauren Weinstein
Dear Pickytarian readers, this is Mrs. Pickytarian writing... I hope you won't mind too much that I have snuck on to the Pickytarian blog to post my own quick entry this week. I just felt a jones. Some might say you can really only have a jones for something like pizza, but shockingly I felt a hankering to write on the blog. But don't worry, your beloved Pickytarian will be back before you can say "I Love Sour Cream!"
This explosively funny, awkward and honest new comics collection by Lauren Weinstein functions like a pair of high-powered binoculars into the brightly colored, tangled mind of a teen girl (her first grittier collection of comics, Inside Vineyland was also excellent, but had more of an older audience in mind). The heroine in these combined strips is none other than our own Lauren Weinstein (aka "Vineshtein"), who begins these tales as a pre-teen girl (moving through high school) who struggles to hide and then justify her passion for Barbies and will do almost anything for a chance to eke her way further up the long social ladder of coolness. Casualties along the climb include a childhood best friend Genine, hilariously and heartbreaking painted by Weinstein as a true-blue, purple tracksuit-clad chubby with glasses. Sweet and loyal as she may be, there's no room in the fast-lane-to-cool for Genine's sidecar. Genine's very essence seems to cast a dork-like pall upon anyone she befriends, and therefore Lauren cuts her loose quite abruptly and cruelly.
Cruelty laced with humor is a prominent theme in Weinstein's book. As Lauren shows us occasional moments of meanness, scorning her less popular peers, so she too is verbally tortured by the shockingly nasty and tousled-haired school bully, Glenn. Later, after a particularly bad Glenn day, Lauren mentally retreats into a soothing dream state with her fantasy man and sensitive 80's superstar, Morrissey. In a hilarious plot to achieve the ultimate Glenn revenge, Morrissey offers to write and perform an angst-ridden 80's song about the bully, sending his humiliation straight to the top of the charts.
In comics today and past, there is an unfortunate tendency by some cartoonists (often of the male persuasion) to depict young women as hyper-stylized, one dimensional fashion plates. These beautiful cardboard phantoms exist in the pages only to illustrate the outsider role of the author/artist, and how happiness and the best things in the world are unattainable to him. In contrast, Weinstein's Lauren is anything but a one-note. Shifting, deeply complex female identities abound in Girl Stories. The heroine herself never really appears physically the same from page to page. Her portraits are more like emotional studies, illustrating complicated states of mind that morph continuously from moment to moment.
Weinstein gives us an intimate tour of an extremely complex and multi-dimensional person. And yes, Vineshtein is sometimes beautiful and styled, but she is also gawky, straggly, grotesque, tearful, enraged, bitter, wistful, sharp-witted and imaginative. She paints herself as a wiggly-lined mass of psychological play dough, displaying herself literally inside-out: twisted up in a pretzel with nerves waiting for her crush to call, bloated like a human toad at Thanksgiving dinner, dripping with ooze after a shoddy belly button piercing, a pair of eyes hiding in a dark tub of liquid mortification during a class experiment, a disgruntled lump refusing to be cheered up at Chanukah by "Latke Boy," or a scantily dressed toffee-limbed performer in her tongue-in-cheek "How to Really Get a Boyfriend" strip.
Lauren is the sum of all these experiences, and she emerges from these pages as a real bona fide "girl" - fully flawed, fully brilliant... and truly amazing.
Posted by jdonelson_nyc at May 5, 2006 12:05 PM
Comments
oh my god mrs. picky! best review ever! where have you been girl. i am calling out a demand of seeing this special guest appearance once a month...at least. brooklyn shouts for more mrs. p.!!! one more thing the mrs. pickytarian font is too cute.
Posted by: mary at May 8, 2006 05:56 PM
Thanks, Mary!!!!!!!!!
ps: brooklyn buys rocketship.
Posted by: mrs. pickytarian at May 9, 2006 10:46 AM
excellent book.
Posted by: owen kline at May 14, 2006 08:51 PM
I must say I disagree with the statement that this book is "honest." I think this book is stereotypical and being a teenage girl right now, I don't think it's very accurate. It seems, instead, to be a medley of situations pulled from Disney Channel shows and plugged into a book.
Posted by: tara at May 23, 2006 07:43 PM
I hear you, Tara. I myself am totally sick of all those Disney Channel movies about kids putting cups full of shit in other kids' lockers, and all the shows about pus-oozing navel infections, etc. You really nailed this one!
Posted by: H Toddler at May 24, 2006 09:51 AM