Rule of Three
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
directed by Marielle Heller
Feature film
Minnie Goetze strolls through a San Francisco park, holding back a grin. ‘I had sex today,’ she boasts via voiceover. Sensing a need for emphasis, she adds an addendum: ‘Holy shit’. Her buoyant mood is marred only when she sees a group of young men ogling a jogger’s chest. Measuring herself up against the passer-by, she furrows her brow. But, accompanied by a billowing, hand-drawn banner bearing the film’s title, she soon smiles and skips on. Minnie defines herself by her love of cartoons, self-doubt, and libido; her own comics combine these three preoccupations. Giant and hairy-legged, her autobiographical creations tower over teenage boys, alternately smothering them with kisses and tossing them aside.
Words by John Wadsworth
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Novel
In a candid diary entry addressed to God, Celie recalls a moment experienced earlier that day. While walking through town, she glimpsed a child that she thinks is hers. Her suspicions are later confirmed. The girl, Olivia, is her daughter. Celie feels that they share not only a likeness, but also a powerful bond. It is as though Olivia looks out at the world through Celie’s eyes, despite their lifelong separation: ‘Like everything I seen, she seen, and she pondering it’. Celie’s letters to God, often painful to read, make up The Color Purple in its entirety. They weave together the lives of several women living in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century, each oppressed many times over.
Words by Sophia Martin-Pavlou
Gone Home
developed by The Fullbright Company
Video game
View a promotional still for the game →
Returning from a holiday, we dump our luggage on the porch of our family home. We retrieve a spare key from its hiding place, only to find the house vacant, parents and younger sister nowhere to be seen. A note is taped to the door, pleading with us not to investigate, but our restraint is overridden by curiosity. We inspect every object we can find, piecing a narrative together: a newspaper clipping of an obituary, a cassette of punk music, tatters torn from a TV guide, old worksheets, self-help books. Scraps of our sister’s scribbled writing chronicle her high-school hopes and fears, from budding new relationships to her unenviable reputation as ‘Psycho House Girl’.
Words by John Wadsworth
Today's connection
The plot of each artwork is recounted to us via journal entries.
More to discover
The Diary of a Teenage Girl: Watch the trailer here.
The Color Purple: Read an excerpt from the novel here. Aida Edemariam has interviewed Alice Walker for The Guardian, as has Megan Labrise for Guernica Magazine.
Gone Home: Watch the launch trailer here, and see a playthrough here. Leigh Alexander has written about the game for The Atlantic, as has Lyndsey Edelman for Kill Screen.
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