by Lucy Mangan
Pascal had previously worked with her husband as a TV writer. In 1982 in the middle of a sticky patch while writing her latest book for teenagers (Love & Betrayal & Hold the Mayo), she remembered an idea she had had for a soap opera about teenagers. An editor friend of hers suggested that it might be better as a series of books. Possibly this was an artistic consideration, but equally possibly it was a commercial one, to capitalise on the fact that by now, teenagers controlled a decent amount of money of their own and were buying books for themselves rather than relying on parents and librarians to choose and hand them down from on high. Either way, Pascal went to her typewriter and banged out this: ‘They are the most perfect twins in the world, Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield. One is good, one is bad. Cliffhanger endings. Continuing characters. The action is always carried by the kids. They run their world, which is very appealing.’
Yes, Francine – YES!
She is named as author of the first two of what would become a 143-strong core series plus innumerable spin-offs. The rest were entirely produced by a host of freelance ghostwriters. Their job was to create, as far as possible, uniform products for a company dedicated to the Pascal–Wakefield enterprise, 17th Street Productions. They used a ‘bible’ (notes on themes, characters, settings and so on, compiled by Pascal) to ensure consistency, and worked to outlines she provided. They were a band of typing postgrad monkeys stretching from sea to shining sea, producing for a fixed fee 140 pages every six to eight weeks. They blended blue jeans, good-hearted hunks, glowering bad boys, motorcycle accidents, Fiat Spiders, southern Californian ocean views, split-level housing, Spanish-tiled kitchens, rich bitches, occasional comas and bouts of hysterical paralysis in perfect proportions. For which sterling efforts I – and, judging by the response my Twitter feed gets whenever I mention your output, the rest of my generation – remain eternally grateful.
I hunted down what scraps I could of this perfect escapist fluff (Torridon only stocked a few of the 12 million copies that were in print by 1986, while the school library eschewed them entirely) and their idealised world and formulaic nature was a joy. They were the Enid Blytons of early teendom, except that (as long as I shut down critical faculties for the duration and ignore the preponderance of rapey boyfriendsfn3) I can still read them now with delight. You could settle down with Taking Sides, Perfect Shot or Wrong Kind of Girl and know that you were in safe hands. Elizabeth and Jessica would always be blonde, size 6 twins with sparkling blue-green eyes and those golden lavaliers (what were they? No idea! So glamorous!fn4) round their necks and feeding each side of your warring adolescent psyche in turn. Elizabeth was ego – sensible, responsible, good at English and impulse control. Jessica was untrammelled id, a slender sociopath you couldn’t help but love. Unless you were Todd, who hated her. Until he didn’t. But let us not dwell on sororal treachery now.
The lean SVH years came to a sudden end with the most remarkable stroke of good luck. Sally went to a local jumble sale one Saturday and found – just lying there on the book stall as if they were ordinary paperbacks instead of manna from the teen romance committee gods! – a twenty-strong run of SVHs. She gathered them in trembling arms and in a quavering voice asked how much they were. ‘Ten pence each,’ came the unbelievable reply. Sally, whose mouth usually got her into more trouble than it ever talked her out of, had the sense this once to keep schtum. She piled them into a box, handed over her dues and got the hell out of Dodge. Her face still lights up at the memory now. For barely more than the price of one new volume, we gorged for days on the adventures of SoCal’s finest. Jessica pretended to be Elizabeth for bad reasons. Elizabeth pretended to be Jessica for good reasons. Todd did various Toddish things Toddishly. Enid arrived (she was the one who got the hysterical paralysis B-plot, like Fallon in Dynasty which I was – not coincidentally – consuming with almost as much avidity at the time). Jessica crushed people’s dreams, manipulated her family as naturally as she breathed, stole innumerable boyfriends from innumerable lesser, nicer females, drove the vulnerable to attempt suicide and everyone continued to find her rising sociopathy vaguely charming (just as they did with Alexis Carrington. And Elizabeth is Krystle! Cultural synergy!). People pretended to be rich, other people pretended to be poor. Bit-parters died of leukaemia and of trying drugs once (just say no, kids!). Elizabeth, after discovering that even getting kidnapped by a hospital orderly (just say no to candy-striping too, kids) doesn’t make her interesting, rebelled against her good-girl image and – uh – went surfing. Steven came and went from college, tripping a few plot switches along the way. Unhappy rich girls shoplifted, chubby people lost weight, and I daresay a few ghostwriters lost their minds. The New York Times must certainly have had to pop a restorative pill or two when Perfect Summer became the first young-adult novel ever to make its paperback bestseller list, as it did in 1985 – alongside books by Norman Mailer, Leon Uris and John Updike.
No matter. We loved it all. Yes, we were being indoctrinated with constricting and toxic messages about sexuality, femininity, wealth and assorted other aspects of humanity and society you would prefer people kept as free and open a mind about as possible, but on the other hand – Robin got slim and won the school-sponsored beauty pageant (school-sponsored beauty pageant! WTactualF was going on in 1980s SoCal?) and got made a Phi Beta Bumcrack AND became co-head of the cheerleading squad, guys! It was awesome!
BLUME
Sally and I found much else in biblio-common. We were moving into the lighter end of adult fare, for some reason via the biographies of the more or less picturesquely poverty stricken – Christine Marion Fraser’s Blue Above the Chimneys and Helen Forrester’s Twopence to Cross the Mersey figured large. But our greatest bond was Anne Digby’s Trebizon. This was another boarding-school series but – get this – set in the modern world. It was disconcerting. All the standard fixtures and fittings were there – a new girl (Rebecca Mason) who, after temporarily falling for the blandishments of what was not, even in that modern setting, quite known as a bitch, realises the error of her ways and becomes firm friends with an established gang of school stalwarts with one defining physical characteristic and talent apiece: in this case, Tish (good at games, unnaturally thick legsfn5), Sue (good at music, wore glasses), Mara (Greek, good at supplying office equipment for the new Juniper house magazine), and Sally ‘Elf’ Elphinstone (fat, good at making up a quintet) in time to solve the mystery of who has stolen Rebecca’s poem and passed it off as her own.
Rebecca, in case you were wondering, was tall and blonde and good at tennis and writing poetry. She got double helpings of everything because she was the Main Character, you see.
The Trebizon series also had – brace yourselves, please – BOYS in it. The fourth book in the series is actually called Boy Trouble at Trebizon. Rebecca starts going out with Tish’s brother Robbie. I know! Martha – bring me my digitalis … In real life – these are the twelve-to-fourteen years – my classmates were discovering real boys. I thought I was doing quite well to have discovered them in books. Had I looked like one of the Wakefield twins, I might perhaps have followed Sally’s lead and got interested in dating, but the mirror and my family and friend’s ongoing refusal to palter with the truth militated against this. The very vocal consensus was that, while I might end up passable eventually, between the braces, the glasses, the grease, the blackheads and a seven-stone frame that made me look more like a drowned chick than anything human, let alone nubile, I should for the foreseeable future keep very much to my books. I look back on the few photographs that were taken during this period and think – yep, fair enough.
You will probably not be surprised to learn that I didn’t really have a proper teenage rebellion. I looked around at everyone else’s – the goths, the slags, the booze, fag ’n’ drug experimenters, the tantrum-throwers, the weepers – and it seemed like a lot of work. So I remained outwardly composed and compliant. But inwardly, I like to think, I was as miserable as the best of them. I kept my unhappiness about never f
itting in, about not having more than one friend, excellent though she was, and about looking like someone’s discarded parasitic twin, to myself. Being apparently unbothered by everything only made me more of an outcast, but I just didn’t know how to join in. As the clamour and frenzy of others’ angst gathered ever more thickly and cacophonously round me, I felt like Ernest Thesiger, the Edwardian actor who when asked about his experiences at the front during the First World War cried ‘My dear – the noise! The people!’
Then – a break in the clouds. We all, overnight – or so it seemed – discovered Judy Blume. I don’t know how it happened – maybe Mrs Heathfield got a memo from the Department of Health saying ‘It Is Time’ and unlocked a secret cupboardful of her works and our hormones drew us towards them in a kind of reverse Bisto-sniff – but suddenly she was everywhere. Judy Blume was the second and last book craze ever to hit school, the last author to unite bookworms and normals in common reading purpose. In her books was everything that SVH left out – reality, mess, humanity and wit.fn6 To have another shared passion was brilliant. It gave us all – even me, especially me – something to talk about, to enthuse about and the break from self-imposed cynicism and relentless manufacture of scorn was in itself a joy. But the sensation of gaining a friend and mentor in Blume herself, someone older and wiser and yet still so completely understanding, with such perfect recollection of the grotesque, tumultuous time of adolescence, of its bravura and its awful vulnerabilities was so, so much better.
It’s hard to remember which one of Judy Blume’s books I read first – they were all consumed so quickly and have been part of me for so long. But I think – and the publication dates of my battered collection suggest – that it was Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
All together now! ‘We must, we must, we must increase our bust!’
I don’t know whether to curse la Blume for giving me false hope or gratefully acknowledge the fact that, false or not, it was frequently only the faintly flickering hope that a bosom and assorted other physical accoutrements might one day arrive that kept me hacking on through the fetid swamp of adolescence.
‘We must …’ was the rallying cry of Margaret, Nancy and the rest of the teenage coterie with whom Margaret becomes involved when she moves house, and encapsulated the fervent desire of every pubescent reader to be able to do something, anything to hurry along the dreaded and longed-for day when the long-promised ‘changes’ would start to arrive. Menstruation, first bras, masturbation, self-regard, self-loathing, hormonal mood swings, slut-shaming (there wasn’t a name for it yet, but the practice itself was alive, well and here aimed at poor, overdeveloped Laura Danker in her swollen sweaters) and all the hideous, fabulous rest of it are here in Blume’s first foray into a part of the children’s literary landscape she would make her own during the 1970s and 80s. Her insistence on writing about these things has made her a controversial figure for much of her career, especially in her native America where she was the subject of an organised book-banning campaign in the 1980s after Reagan’s election and remains one of the country’s most frequently challenged authors of the twenty-first century. Truly, the world is frightened of those who would speak truth unto teenage girls.
Though it’s maybe broader than that. Maybe it’s anyone who wants to speak truth to children. Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia, for example, is still number 28 on the list of 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books published every decade by the American Library Association, presumably because it deals with the subject of death and so prompts adults to consider the perennial question of how much reality children can bear. When the answer is felt to be ‘not very much’, a book tends to become Officially Controversial and make it onto lists like this.
But the question is really – how much reality can we bear to let our children bear? On the one hand, children are inadvertently quite good at protecting themselves. By and large when reading, the things they aren’t ready for simply go over their heads or flit lightly across their minds, leaving a faint impression that can be deepened and shaded later by experience or exposure to other books (or films, or TV, or Internet …) as the years go on. On the other, this is a hard thing for a parent to trust in, running as it does counter to every primitive instinct in us that wants to keep our children safe from all possible harm. Lead-lined bunkers instead of Roald Dahl, remember? But of course we can and we must, otherwise – well, you only have to look at the rest of the ALA’s list to see what madness can unfold. In the Night Kitchen is there at number 24. Naked bottoms in crazy dreamscapes are apparently worse than child mortality. Eric Carle’s Draw Me a Star is at number 61. Did atheist parents object to the picture book’s parallels with the Bible’s creation story, or did a cross-denominational group balk at the human figures having no clothes on? It is truly impossible to imagine what objections were lodged to bring Iona and Peter Opie’s I Saw Esau – a book of traditional children’s rhymes – in at number 98. Is ‘Donkey walks on four legs / And I walk on two / The last one I saw /Was very like you’ enough to give anyone the vapours? The last edition published did have illustrations by Sendak. So maybe that’s enough?
But back to Blume. I raced through everything else she had written for my age group – Deenie, Blubber, Tiger Eyes (I only managed that once – the death of a parent was something I was not willing to contemplate for too long. I’m still not), Then Again Maybe I Won’t (a kind of Are You There God? from a boy’s point of view), Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself (which I somehow forgot to take on holiday with me to Preston when it had me most firmly in its grip. I spent the fortnight in a fever of yearning to get back to its ten-year-old vivacious heroine, her aunt’s borscht and Sally’s equally vivid imaginings about being Esther Williams and of unmasking Hitler, who she suspects is one of her neighbours, hiding in plain sight after the war). And – oh gosh, there’s one other, what WAS the name of that again? Oh yes – Forever …
Certain books had done the rounds over the previous year or so with their rude bits marked for quick perusal – various Jilly Coopers, Shirley Conran’s Lace, Judith Krantz’s Scruples and so on – but the rudest of them all was Forever …, and this time we all read every word. The story of Katherine, Michael and Ralph is engraved on every adolescent heart that has beaten since it was first published in … well, guess. You won’t believe this – I didn’t, because we all think we were the first to discover it, just as every generation thinks it’s the first to discover sex, and that she therefore must have written it three months max before we found it – but Forever … was first published in 1975. Blume wrote it after her daughter Randy bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t find a book about two kids having sex in which the girl didn’t have to be punished (with an unwanted child, an abortion, or by being sent away from the boy to stay with relatives in one of the less fun states, or death) afterwards, and its depiction of mutually desired, ugly-consequence-free sex remains, over forty years on, still surprisingly rare. It’s the book I always want to press into the hands of any teenage girl I see engrossed in the Twilight saga.
For the uninitiated, Twilight is the first in a series of four books by Stephenie Meyer about seventeen-year-old Bella Swan who falls in love with Edward Cullen, who turns out to be a vampire. He has renounced the drinking of human blood but the hunger remains. Thus they can never have sex, because WHO KNOWS what urges might be released in the throes of passion and he fears that he might end up killing Bella instead of making sweet, sweet love to her. Over the course of the book(s) Bella becomes more and more passive, training herself not to respond to his kisses (when she does respond, he draws away and berates her for endangering herself), gradually isolating herself from her friends and family in order to protect his secret, and generally learning to subordinate her every impulse and desire to the need not to upset Edward and his instincts. You don’t have to squint too hard to see dubious parallels between this and the real-life dynamic of abusive relationships. Meyer is a practising Mormon who generally argues
that her books are about learning to master your nature, and fans defend her take on romance as the erotics of abstinence. To me, the whole thing reads badly (in every sense – Meyer is no great stylist) and feels toxic, anti-feminist and regressive and should be staked through its black, black heart. In love with a hundred-year-old vampire Bella may be, but Buffy, she ain’t. Nor is she Katherine, who in Forever … not only has and enjoys sex without regrets, but also doesn’t marry Michael. By the end, she has even survived the sadness of breaking up and has moved on.
And Edward? You may have a sparkly face and great abs, but you are no Michael. Or, indeed, Ralph. Ralph was the name Michael gave to his penis and Ralph really was entirely positive about people responding to his interest. This is how things should be.
A few years ago, I interviewed Judy Blume at an event in Waterstone’s Piccadilly. The place was packed with thirtysomething women who listened intently to the tiny, fragile-looking, seventy-six-year-old woman talking about her forty-odd years writing for adolescents, the fights she’d had and continues to have with censors, though nowadays less on her own behalf than on others’, and her memories of writing the various books that people had clutched to their chests. By the end of the interview, it was just a roomful of tearful women queuing to have their books signed and trying to find the words to tell Blume just what she’d meant to them for so many years, how it felt to see their stories in print, being depicted with truth and compassion and without condescension.
I didn’t manage it myself. I couldn’t afford to. The only time we had to chat was before the interview, and I couldn’t risk reducing myself to a puddle of gratitude and emotion. But I did ask if I could be cheeky and get her to sign beforehand not one but two books – Are You There God? and Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself – because, I explained, they had both at different points meant everything to me. I couldn’t choose between them and – yes, I actually said this – I didn’t want one to feel left out. She understood completely.