What it’s like to be a girl

Jessica Zack, the author of this week’s cover story, was completely taken with Phoebe Gloeckner’s outrageously honest book “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” and was eager to see how it would translate to the screen. “I knew it would be an incredibly tricky feat to pull off,” she says, “to say the least. A story about a girl who unapologetically loves sex and experiences some seriously adult pleasures with a child’s glee. Yet Marielle Heller’s vision, and Bel Powley’s knock-out performance as Minnie, had me from the first scene (that I predict will be studied by film students) of her bouncing through Golden Gate Park, and her first lines: ‘I had sex today. Holy s—!’ ”

Zack thinks the film works because Minnie isn’t played as a victim or a minx. “Bel’s performance captures that moment in an adolescent girl’s life when it’s like you’ve walked through a door from childhood into something more adult — something potentially a lot more fun, and undoubtedly more confusing,” she says. “I’m older than Marielle, and younger than Phoebe, but we all grew up in the Bay Area — and it was great fun talking to them about the universal aspects of adolescence and the particulars of a girlhood in San Francisco, whether in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s.

“I wish there were more movies made by women, about women, with such honest, brave story lines.”

Today’s cover story about Gloeckner, Powley and “Diary of a Teenage Girl” begins on Page 12. Next week: Murals on Market Street.