A Whole World of Problems, Brought to you by Judy Blume and V.C. Andrews

I read an edited collection last year titled Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume. Basically, the thread that ties the essays together is that Judy Blume’s characters are relatable to young girls, and this relatability is timeless because Blume really captures what it is like to be a pubescent or adolescent girl. If that sounds a bit circular, it is. Most of the women in the anthology lovingly describe these books as central to their formative years, maybe in the same way that kids today will look back on the Harry Potter or Twilight series. As one contributor put it, “the books made me see that I was normal.” I respectfully disagree.

Now, yes, I read a bunch of these books, but I can only say I really loved one of them: Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, which is semi-autobiographical. I’m not even sure it’s a children’s book, and I mean this as a compliment—it’s about a Jewish family in Miami after the end of World War II. The main character, Sally, is funny and interesting (she has an ongoing fantasy that she spots Hitler in a grocery store or park and blows his cover, bringing him to justice, and she’s constantly trying to figure out the meaning of dirty jokes the teenagers around her tell) and the book does not feel like a vehicle for getting an IMPORTANT MESSAGE across. It’s a good story, and I recommend it. A close second is Blubber (she really gets the way kids turn on each other overnight) and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, written from a boy’s perspective. Up until then, I thought boys had it easy, but the unpredictable hard-ons and wet dreams the character endures in that book made me feel most fortunate. I was also glad I did not live in New Jersey, because it was full of what the main charcter called "social climbers."

The book most often cited in this collection is Are you there God, It’s Me Margaret. This is the book that focuses on menstruation, as well as on choosing a religion, though I’m not sure the two subplots merge all that seamlessly. It was published in 1970, but by 1981 (when I read it) it was already dated: sanitary pads weren’t even called that any longer, and they didn’t use any kind of belt contraption (that really confused me at the time). What was ultimately disappointing about the book, though, was that it was so divorced from my own experience that I was angry that I hadn’t been born just ten years earlier. Margaret and her friends talked about getting their periods! They were excited about it! They wanted breasts! I and my own circle of friends in the Boston suburb of Andover, Massachusetts (home to Philips Academy and a whole lot of kids whose parents want them to get accepted to Philips Academy--basically, social climbers) found menstruation disturbing and horrifying--and we rarely discussed it at all. When we did, we came to two conclusions: First, having your period would make you more likely to attract sharks if you were swimming in the ocean (see previous post). It also provided new opportunities for humiliation at school. One girl in my math class was excused to go to the bathroom one day and she clearly had a visible stain on the back of her jeans. It was the main topic of discussion for month ("Andrea has her period" "Gross!")which also made her a mess, out of control. Had Margaret even considered this?

Breasts, too, were not considered a good thing at my school. They got you ridiculed, not admired: I didn’t see where Blume’s characters were getting this “we must, we must, we must increase our bust,” "Gro-Bra" mentality. We wanted to flatten ours out so no one would notice. Also, we didn’t call them “busts.” The most developed girl in our school, Susan, had breasts that were pointy and worse, asymmetrical, so they pointed in different directions. Better to delay all of that as long as possible.

No, more comforting to me was the Flowers in the Attic series. Now, they had problems: locked in an attic by their own mother, starved, forced to bury their own little brother and to turn to incest. And through it all the adolescent girl just got thinner, and thus more ethereal and beautiful. Relatable, no, but it was something better—it was about people who had it far worse than I did, and were almost pure victims; the teenage girl would never walk around the eighth grade hallways with blood on her cordoroys. Plus, their problems were ones that I would never, ever have to deal with. So I could always pretend I would have handled it better, gotten out somehow, given the mother and grandmother their comeuppance and saved my little brother. Just like Sally J. Freedman, I could be a hero in my own mind. With Margaret I was just another hormone-filled freak.