Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  It’s always assumed that puberty draws children inward, into a newly intimate relationship with their visible hormonal eruptions, consequent mortification, and not much else. But a new need for privacy shouldn’t be mistaken for narcissism. In these novels, puberty, like a moon’s gravitational pull dragging a body of water into motion from light-years away, stirs up powerfully universal considerations as well. It’s a charged period on a personal level, sure. But these heroines remind us a very large part of the charge is becoming acquainted with the world outside themselves.

  OVERDUE

  Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

  By Judy Blume 1970

  A Real Girl Loved By Girls Everywhere

  By Meg Cabot

  “What book are you reading right now?” a girl named Boitumelo asks me.

  I’m standing in front of 200 girls, 12 to 16 years old, and we’re all many, many miles from home, in the auditorium of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, which helps underprivileged girls from all over South Africa (a nation with 11 official languages) achieve academic excellence.

  I’m hesitant to answer the question. I’m there to talk about writing to girls who come from families so impoverished that Oprah has to send prepackaged meals home with many of them during school holidays just to make sure they get enough to eat. I’m worried that not many of them are going to have heard of the book that I’m reading, which was published in America in 1970 (when I was 3 years old), and that I’m actually rereading in preparation for writing this essay.

  But what the hell. It’s one of my favorites. And I’m there to talk about writing, right?

  “I’m reading Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume,” I tell them.

  I actually jump as the walls of the auditorium reverberate with the thunderous roar of the girls’ approval.

  They’ve heard of it, all right. And read it.

  And like all girls who’ve read Margaret, they love it.

  Never mind that South Africa is about 8,000 miles from New Jersey, where Margaret is set, or that the book was written nearly thirty years before these girls were born.

  Seriously—how can the universal (truly, it expands the globe) appeal of Judy Blume be explained?

  I can only explain why I’ve always loved Judy Blume’s books: It’s the likableness of her heroines; her raw, spare narrative style; her sarcastic sense of humor; the fact that she’d never dream of talking down to her readers; and the relatability of her themes.

  Okay, sure, there was Forever, which a few (well, me) much-too-young-to-“get-it” readers smuggled into their elementary schools and giggled over (need I mention page 96 and Ralph?). Maybe we couldn’t all relate to Forever in the fourth grade. But later we could. And sadly, smarting from our own breakups, we did.

  And maybe for some of us, Deenie, with her model good looks and her “special spot,” went over our heads the first time around (I remember at age eleven wishing I had a “special spot” like Deenie that I could rub and make myself feel better. It took me a while to catch up in that area, but thanks to later readings of Forever, I eventually put two and two together).

  But then there was Margaret. Everyone can relate to Margaret. Margaret’s parents moved her to a new place, against her will, and away from her beloved grandmother Sylvia. Who couldn’t relate to that—and especially to being forced to make all new friends?

  And Judy Blume makes a special point to remind us of those certain kinds of friends peculiar to childhood—friends you only hang out with because they live close to you. Yes, Nancy was that kind of friend. Why else would anyone, particularly Margaret, have liked someone as bossy and unkind in the first place? It was only because Nancy happened to live so close.

  But that’s what Judy Blume does so well—remembers those tiny details from childhood…like friends you only had because they Lived Nearby…as well as create characters as fully fleshed out and recognizable as Nancy, whose insistence on being the Leader in Follow the Leader (and later, of the girls’ secret club) is never questioned—and what makes Blume such a master at her genre. Nancy isn’t the villain in Margaret. She’s Margaret’s friend…until she isn’t. And even then, she still sort of is. Blume pretty much invented—or at least was one of the first to depict, in contemporary YA lit, anyway—the “frenemy.”

  Then there’s the PTS, the club Margaret and her friends form. Who didn’t relate to—or at least long to be in—a club like that? The glamour of belonging to a secret club is what childhood is all about, and Judy Blume captures that…along with the petty squabbles that accompany membership in such a club.

  Couple that with Margaret’s interest in and confusion over boys—and even her own body—and suddenly, Margaret becomes the blueprint for almost every girl’s adolescence experience, no matter where she’s grown up. Although not every girl may have been longing for breasts and her period the way Margaret and her friends were (I certainly wasn’t), all girls are highly aware of one another’s rate of development at that age, and wondering what’s going on with her own.

  And finally, there’s Margaret’s relationship with God and the spiritual quest on which she embarks to find the religion that’s right for her. This is surely the most polarizing issue in the book for many readers, and the one responsible for the book’s being pulled from so many school library shelves (along with Margaret’s frank—and frankly realistic—discussions with her friends of menstruation, bras, breast-growth exercises, boys, possible student-teacher romances, sex behind the A&P, the makeout game Two Minutes in Heaven, and the possibility of being felt up while wearing a training bra stuffed with cotton balls).

  Upon the book’s censoring in the Reagan-era 80s, horrified parents exclaimed, “This is not how eleven-year-olds talk!” while their 11-year-olds were not only talking that way, but doing far, far worse.

  Some refer to Margaret as Judy Blume’s “period” book, but to me it was always actually her “spiritual crisis” book, in which a girl without religion—Margaret’s parents have raised her with the thought that she’ll choose her own faith when the time is right—struggles to find her place in a community where “everyone” except Margaret goes either to Sunday school or Hebrew school. With a loving Jewish grandmother and a set of distant but fairly well-meaning Christian grandparents, each pressuring Margaret to choose their own faith, Margaret suffers an eventual spiritual crisis, declaring her lack of belief in the existence of God, and refusing to speak to him anymore.

  A typical tween, Margaret is as much upset over the hypocrisy of the adults around her as she is over the fact that all of her friends have gotten their periods—everyone, it seems, except for her. Even her own body is betraying her.

  It’s all delicious stuff, deftly and humorously handled. The novel ends with Margaret realizing Nancy is a liar, finally getting her own period, and thus reopening the lines of communication with God—but Judy Blume, as always, avoids a tidy denouement: Margaret doesn’t choose one religion over the other. She still hasn’t decided where she fits in, Sunday school or Hebrew school, and there is more than a slightly cynical suggestion that she may never choose.

  The most delightful thing to me about Judy Blume books is that unlike so many other children’s books, they never feature a sage adult offering the younger characters wise counsel in their time of need (at the most, during the height of her spiritual crisis, Margaret’s mother suggests Margaret go to the movies with a friend. Margaret uses the opportunity to buy feminine products she doesn’t need to see what it “feels like”); Judy Blume’s books aren’t “issue” driven, never offering readers a “message” or “lesson” and they don’t have pat, sugarcoated Hollywood endings to leave readers feeling satisfied.

  Instead, Judy Blume’s heroines, like Margaret, simply go on living. Just like the rest of us.

  Which is why we loved Margaret when we were younger. And why new generations of girls the wide world over—as I found out at Oprah’s school in South Africa—a
re discovering her today, and loving her as well. Margaret is, simply, real.

  BOOK REPORT

  Sister of the Bride

  By Beverly Cleary 1963

  Veiled Messages

  I guess this is just one of those days, thought Barbara MacLane on her way home from school one bright afternoon late in April. She was not alone. She was walking beside a boy, a very tall boy, but their thoughts were like those famous parallel lines that lie in the same plane but never meet.

  Is it possible to write a feminist novel featuring a cunning lace jacket and the baking of many batches of Snickerdoodles? I hope so, because I have always been so obsessed both with the cover’s little lace jacket and the seaspray-green organza bridesmaid gown that primly reveals our heroine’s trim arms (so much so that I have unconsciously bought its clone two or three times) that I’d like to think all my purchases have also been politically uplifting. In any case, giving it the old college try is Beverly Cleary, best known for the unsinkable Ramona Quimby, not her many novels of young love—though many of them put as profound a spin on adolescent girldom as Ramona does on a girl’s childhood.

  When we meet Barbara MacLane, she is a junior in high school, a scant—in her optimistic view—two years behind her sister Rosemary, who’s just announced she’s marrying her college beau, Greg. Barbara, painfully stuck at home spatting with her younger brother Gordy, is at that mutable age where one’s personality seems as up for debate as health-care reform, and Rosemary—a chilly, eminently more sophisticated moon—is currently the tidal draw toward which Barbara is pulled.

  While Barbara toils along, hounded by the family Siamese, teased by her father, and seemingly only tolerated by her busy mother, Rosemary is newly slim, getting exposed to Plato and psychology, beloved by a former Air Force captain, and otherwise enjoying all the intellectual and emotional fruits available to a liberated woman of the early 1960s.

  Barbara is desperate to be similarly liberated, but her own prospects for the future, school-and boy-wise, seem dim. Not only are her grades endangering her future at Cal, Barbara’s current swains are only the moody neighbor Tootie Bodger, a trombonist with a desperate crush on her, and Bill Cunningham, who appears, dashingly, on his Vespa to flirt with her and gobble up all the cookies, then departs before asking her out.

  But when Rosemary announces her impending wedding, she pounces. “Maybe at last she had found what she wanted to do…get married in two years like Rosemary.” If she can’t live Rosemary’s new, sophisticated life, she can at least, for one day, live her wedding.

  As befits a dreamer casting about for a dream, Barbara’s idea of a wedding is born from the bright pages of magazines she studies busily, involving flowing veils, handsome groomsmen, exquisite flowers, and other celebratory perks. In her world, a wedding is less an event than spiritual Kabuki, aesthetics and accoutrement reflecting the purity and poetry of true love.

  But Rosemary, newly practical and modern, is irritatingly unwilling to invest in this fantasy. Her post-pillbox view of marriage involves a small wedding, a suit, brown towels, and, ideally, hand-thrown pottery. Engagement rings are “middle class” presents mean she and Greg will be plagued by “things” and she’s going to finish school, not drop out to be a better wife—because Greg thinks school will make her “a better wife and mother.” Rosemary and Barbara’s mother is bemused, their grandmother aghast, but Barbara deeply crushed:

  She’s overdoing it all the way, thought Barbara. No pretty dishes, no pastel linens, that practical suit. The whole thing, from Barbara’s point of view, was beginning to sound just plain dreary. If this went on, she and Greg would probably spend their honeymoon picketing something.

  But if Rosemary’s view of marriage leaves much to be desired, Barbara thinks the vision offered by her mother’s generation is even worse. A member of a happy-housewife group called the Amys (Rosemary’s college-educated verdict, much to the amusement of her parents, is that the Amys “don’t use their minds”), Barbara’s mother seems unduly concerned with the price of flowers and the length of the veil, practical matters Barbara thinks should be divorced from the altar’s joys. When the Amys give Rosemary a shower complete with dish towels, sequined oven mitts, and endless fish molds, Barbara internally grouses, “There was no poetry in their soul. Just recipes.”

  But now Rosemary, who has finally accepted the idea of an engagement ring and veil, is starting to display a dismal household-drudge streak, too. She and Greg secure an apartment where they can exchange rent for being landlords, and Barbara, picturing a sleek, modern building or, alternatively, charming old place crawling with plants, is dismayed about the actual digs: a gray, junky apartment with a taxi-yellow bathroom and a Murphy bed in a building where Rosemary will be stuck lining the garbage cans with newspaper and cooking in the teeny kitchen. “And bragging about how she would clean those halls to pay the rent! What was the matter with her anyway? Had the poetry gone out of her soul, too?”

  But the absolute nadir occurs when Rosemary, who, in her new sophistication, is usually a dependable co-snickerer at the Amys and her mother’s generation, starts, appallingly, to soften:

  “…but next semester I think I’ll join the Dames.”

  “And what are the Dames?” demanded Barbara, beginning to undress.

  “A club for wives of students,” answered Rosemary.

  “What do they do?” Barbara was always curious about university life.

  “Oh—things like having someone talk on nutrition and how to get the most out of the food dollar,” said Rosemary.

  At least this was on a higher plane than the Amys, who were inclined to exchange cooky recipes. It was evidence that the Dames used their minds.

  “And at the end of the semester there is a party,” continued Rosemary with a mischievous smile.

  “That is when the girls who work while their husbands go to school are awarded their Ph.T. degree.”

  Barbara had heard of a Ph.D. degree, but never of a Ph.T. This was a new one. “What does that stand for?” she asked, pulling on her nightgown.

  “Putting Hubby through,” answered Rosemary, laughing.

  Barbara groaned. “They sound every bit as bad as the Amys. Worse, even.”

  “Maybe,” agreed Rosemary, “but they have fun.” She thought a moment before she said, “And so do the Amys.”

  It’s interesting that, on the cusp of the feminist movement, with its cowl-neck-sporting support groups, Cleary chose to offer a defense of the women’s support groups that already did exist. Dispatching with a poison pen the psychobabble-spouting coeds in muumus who think women should “use their minds” but can’t themselves finish a dress, Cleary, through Barbara, emphasizes that the Amys are capable of doing both:

  There was actually a variety of women in the room—the Amy who wore leather sandals and wove her own skirts, another who was active in the League of Women Voters, the mother whose calm was never disturbed by her six children, a mother who wanted to write but could not find time, an Amy whose rough hands and deep tan were the results of hours spent in her hillside garden.

  There might be something silly about sequin-trimmed oven mitts—but it’s not clear it’s any less silly than only wanting hand-thrown pottery and brown towels. Cleary’s housewives, and Rosemary, aren’t just housewives—Barbara’s mother works, both for money and enjoyment, and if Rosemary rolls her hair, she rolls it while studying Plato. Even Barbara has to admit that the Amys, who take on the flowers, food, and sewing needs of the wedding, have impressive and useful skills: “The Amys had many talents…Barbara and her mother were most grateful of all to the Amy who dropped in to admire the wedding presents, and watched Millie stolidly sewing her way through the seaspray organza, and simply took the whole thing away from her and that morning had returned it, complete and pressed.”

  This may explain why Barbara, who’s been seduced by wifely fantasies into playing Bill’s help meet, begins to chafe. Bill, stuffed to the gills with Snickerdoodles Ba
rbara’s already begun buying at the store (she has chemistry class, after all), finally kills his chances with her when he has the audacity to bring her a shirt to mend because she seems so “domestic”:

  She discovered she was tired of baking cookies for that—cooky hound. She was tired of trying to win him, and as for her daydreams about getting married someday, she found them so silly she was embarrassed even thinking about them. Imagine living in an apartment like Rosemary’s with Bill Cunningham and washing his socks. Never, never, never!

  Domesticity, Barbara is learning, is deeply unpoetical. It’s a battery of practical skills. But, in its dingy, fond way, it strains toward its own rubber-glove beauty, when there’s love:

  Not everything about Rosemary’s life was wrong. There was Greg. And marriage was not something out of the slick and colorful pages of a magazine. It was not just parties and new clothes and flowers and a wedding veil…. It was a lot of other things, too, like love and trust and living within one’s income and, in Rosemary and Greg’s case, putting their educations ahead of their immediate comfort. Why, Rosemary was prepared to do all of this cheerfully, even gaily, and it had not even occurred to her that she was being brave or self-sacrificing. She was doing it because she loved Greg and had faith in his future.

  And for the first time the thought came to Barbara that Greg was lucky to be marrying her sister.

  By the end of the book, Barbara has happily tossed aside her bouquet dreams—as well as her desire to follow in Rosemary’s footsteps. She’s not going to pin her future on a hazy groomsman, she’s going to figure out what kinds of people she likes—and what kind of person she is. Shockingly, both Tootie and Bill ask her out, and she happily accepts. “It was funny, but now that she suddenly had dates with two boys for the same weekend, a lot of things were changed. Life was interesting, something to be explored, and a wedding did not seem nearly so desirable.” And, with an irony far greater than a bejeweled oven mitt, a cheery book about an early wedding becomes an argument for anything but.