Blast from the Past: Judy Blume
DoubleX, the online magazine by and for women that spun off of Slate, today has a delightful interview with Judy Blume, an author who meant the world to me during a truly awful stretch of adolescence, roughly from age 11 to 14.
Cue the Rod Serling voice: Picture, if you will, a Midwestern girl with gappy teeth, glasses so big they obscured her eyebrows and a dreadful haircut with a deep side part that allowed her hair to cover about two thirds of her face. This has an upside, since she’s suddenly a head taller than all of her classmates and consequently has nowhere to hide except in said hair.
Note that she is surrounded by kids who seem to have by and large skipped the awkward stage and gone straight to Dorothy Hamill haircuts and high-waist, trouser-pleated Zena jeans, and that her best friend Heidi moved away over the summer and her next best friend Ramona recently dumped her to elbow her way into a more popular social circle.
Then watch the girl, brimful of questions about everything that seems to be changing in her life, take her hall pass and enter the middle-school library. She’s outgrown Laura Ingalls Wilder. She’s read Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack about 23 times. She only read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH because her reading teacher made them pick a book from the list that qualified for the Junior League’s essay contest for middle-schoolers, in which she took either second or third place.
So she’s trolling the shelves looking for something, anything, new to read. And there it is: Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret. A book about a girl with every question, every longing I myself had. I read that book more times than Dinky Hocker, I’m sure. And I read many more of Blume’s stories. The cover of Forever sticks in my mind.
Blume’s books were a lifeline at a time when I felt friendless, and when I desperately needed reassurance that I was normal.
The interview reminded me that Blume’s books have been frequent targets for banning, and so in honor of Banned Books Week, I wanted to link you to the interview and suggest you pick up one of her novels.
Oh, and don’t miss what she says about the gray area between “mainstream” and “young adult” fiction. I’ve posed the question of whether Austen’s novels would be YA if published today; Blume asks the same about Catcher in the Rye.