Alternate Interpretation of Diary of a Teenage Girl

I discovered the film Diary of a Teenage Girl while consuming yet another Lolita film adaptation analysis video essay on YouTube. This film was presented as an accurate and respectful adaptation of teenage grooming, so I decided to watch it, because I'm damaged, and I relate to these stories.

Diary of a Teenage Girl follows 15-year-old Minnie who lives with her mom and sister and attends school after school in 1970s San Francisco, because she hates school and she loves drawing cartoons. She becomes prey to her mom's nearly 35-year-old boyfriend Monroe, and the two begin a secret affair. As her relationship with Monroe emotionally taxing, Minnie seeks male attention from boys at her school and strangers at the theatre. When her mother Charlotte finally discovers her relationship by reading her daughter's diary, she tries to make her marry Monroe (whut..?) so Minnie runs away. Minnie ends up lost and high on Quaalude by the time her mom finds her. At the end of the story, Minnie begins attending a new high school for troubled students and confronts Monroe, no longer caring for him.

The film is based off a half-graphic novel of the same name, which doesn't hold back with depictions of Monroe's genitals or Minnie's toplessness. The film is almost a book-accurate adaptation with minor deviations, but the biggest, in my opinion, changes the course of the novel.

In both the film and the book, Minnie has a distant relationship with her stepdad Pascal, a traditional professor who doesn't like his ex-wife's heavy drinking and drug abuse (both Charlotte and Monroe smoke and sniff cocaine at the home with Charlotte's two girls and they sleep with other people). In the movie, he seems to be a misunderstood caring father figure who wants to pay for Minnie's tuition at the best schools possible and asks her to live with him instead of her unstable home. The book paints a much more sinister picture.

Both the movie and book show Pascal being somewhat of a sex freak, calling Minnie a "nymphomaniac" and telling Charlotte that Minnie's need for affection from her mother is sexual. He also clocks Monroe as a pedophile sleeping with Minnie right away. At the end of the novel only, it's revealed that Pascal has been sleeping with girls Minnie's age, and Charlotte has known about this her entire marriage with him. In the movie, she looks like the bad guy for subjecting her children to a drug-filled household while Pascal is the antihero barred from seeing his stepdaughters. In actuality, Charlotte tried to get her children away from someone she knew to be statutorily raping the students he tutors. (To be clear, she was also stifled in the marriage, and her new boyfriend also turns out to be a pedophile, so her reasons for divorcing Pascal were also for her own benefit.)

This brings up the question, did Minnie's grooming actually start before Monroe? She knew her stepdad thought she was a nympho and her mom repeatedly criticised her appearance, leaving her with bottom-of-the-barrel self-esteem. She even opens both the book and movie by saying, "I was an ugly child. My appearance has not improved so I suppose it was lucky he was attracted to my youth." Was she taught from an early age that it's normal and appropriate for grown men to be attracted to her as a child? Did Pascal say anything else to her to open her up to the advances of grown men? I find it strange that Minnie is the one to tell Monroe, "I want you to fuck me," and then actually does it. The book almost hints that Pascal planted the seed that grew into the weed that her teen years became.

Another interpretation I took away from the book was that nearly everything is made up. Minnie creates these reckless sex fantasies with boys from school, strangers, and a lesbian Quaalug user to cope with the emotional abuse from Monroe using and ghosting her. She creates these scenarios to make Monroe jealous, to give him an erotic thrill, and to justify her dramatic mood swings that come from Monroe's hot-cold mentality. Her sexual ventures almost sound like a self-destructive fantasy. For instance, it doesn't make sense that her best friend Kimmie goes from accusing Monroe of taking advantage of her one day, to giving the man whose kid she babysits fellatio and trying to to rope Minnie into a threesome with her and this grown man (the threesome is mentioned in the book, but the Kimmie in the movie only goes as far as talking about the blowjobs). And then Kimmie and Minnie have a threesome with Monroe. It makes more sense that Minnie fears losing control and is jealous of Monroe being with other women and may even be insecure that she's not the only teenage girl he's having sex with.

Such a fantasy would match my own narrative more accurately. 

I was eighteen and my groomer--let's call him Cushboy (it's an inside joke)--was the same age as Monroe. Another key difference was that we never met in person, so there was no sex and no kissing. However, the emotional turmoil I went through was worded perfectly through Minnie's diction in the novel. Even the first interaction, when Minnie and Monroe are cuddling alone on the couch watching TV before anything has officially "started," and Monroe does the classic boob graze. Minnie narrates, "I had this strangely calming feeling that even if he meant to touch my tit, it was okay because he's a good guy, and he knows how things go and I don't." It's the classic childhood trust of an adult with dubious intentions simply because he's an adult!

I met Cushboy on the classic groomer's choice of social media--Discord--in a server. And I knew he was in his thirties, as most of the men in the server were in their late twenties and thirties. But they all had academic degrees and were strictly anti-pedo and seemed like safe men. So when Cushboy started chatting with me one-on-one--after I had initiated the dialogue--I saw him as an older brother, and I immediately felt comfortable around him. And when he began flirting, my initial thought wasn't that it was weird for a 34-year-old to be attracted to me. He was a good guy, he had a good head on his shoulders, he had a lifetime of experience more than I did, and he wouldn't hurt me.

Early on, Minnie is aware that Monroe is taking advantage of her, and she even writes him a couple of letters, condemning him for using her and demanding why she isn't good enough. And I myself even scripted a letter to Cushboy calling him out for taking away my control, and I took a photo of the letter and texted it to him on Discord. And even after one month of talking, I realised that he had to be somewhat pedophilic, because he found my sheltered naivete and childish innocence cute and charming. And he wanted me to wear school uniforms. And he had a celebrity crush on Olivia Rodrigo and he found every teen singer that I liked hot. But I didn't want to stop talking to him, as Minnie didn't want to stop having sex with Monroe, because they made us feel good, and we felt safe and comfortable in their presence, when we had no tangible evidence that they were safe.

I followed Minnie's mood swings of being disgusted by Monroe and wanting to hurt him the way he hurt her, but also despairing whenever he would disappear for weeks on end and longing for his presence. I'd deceive myself that I could forget about Cushboy in two days, and then for weeks on end I'd pine for his affection. I felt disgusted by my attraction to him and I didn't understand why I was, yet I was so immensely in love with him that it hurt me. 

Another strange commonality between my story and Minnie's is what I'll call the "crying scene." When we weak and vulnerable teenagers witness our mid-30s groomer cry for the first time--and only time, in both of our cases. Minnie and Monroe both take acid, and Monroe has a bad trip and breaks down crying, begging Minnie not to leave him and telling her he loves her. I had a nearly identical experience with Cushboy, yet there were no drugs involved, and it was over a literal Discord call. I almost wish I was joking, because it's almost comical.

After I sent him the letter telling him I felt under his control and I needed to stop talking to him, I crawled back to him a week later. And he told me the letter made him cry, and he told me that the prospect of me killing myself scared him. And then he broke down sobbing on call and went on about how wonderful I was, how he hated that I felt so badly about myself (low-self-esteem teen needing a groomer to emotionally fulfill her ringin' a bell?), and how it killed him that he couldn't do anything about it. How he felt powerless. And I was so touched, because for the previous four months of our situationship, I could never tell if he was genuine in his advances toward me. But the fact that he cared so much about me that it actually moved him to tears made his feelings clear, in my naive teen ears. Not that Minnie and I were both witness to a mid-30s man's mental breakdown as he realises how pathetic he is for being addicted to a teenage girl.

Because both Cushboy and Monroe were addicted to their teenage girls. That's why they kept returning to them in the first place. Certainly, Minnie and I wore our obsessions with our grown men on our sleeve, so it looked more like we were the obsessed ones. But what 35-year-old man goes back to the same 15-year-old girl to hook up with her multiple times a week for a year and a half? What 35-year-old engages in an online relationship with a 19-year-old for eight months, calling hours a day, with a 9-hour time difference?

And like Minnie, I relate to the spiraling in mental health as we both realise that the person on whom we rely most is inconstant and doesn't actually care about us, and we're in love with a phantom, a phantom who disgusts us and uses us, but we keep going back for more.

Diary of a Teenage Girl will always be special to me, and every time I rewatch the movie, I glean a new detail that I missed about myself.