What Every Girl Should Know

*Spoilers Ahead*

Having never been a pubescent or pre-pubescent girl in the 1970s and 1980s, I did not grow up reading Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  I do remember it being passed around and discussed in hushed whispers somewhere in my childhood, but I never picked the book up to read it until two days ago.  Now I am a 43 year old man, and while I have a teenage child, he is a son and not a daughter, so my interest in Blume’s landmark novel is above all else literary.

Are You There God? is really a fantastic book for two reasons.  The first is the sharpness and clarity of the writing.  To some that may sound silly, since all children’s books are written with simple sentences and direct statements, but when done by a strong writer (like Blume, or Dahl, or L’Engle) the sentences have a rhythm and poetry of their own that aligns them closer to Hemingway and Vonnegut than to other children’s books.  The sentences are deceptively simple, saying much more than the individual words would suggest, packing complex meaning into the commonest language.  It reads, in short, like a stylistic choice rather than a conventional necessity.

The second reason, and the one that really blew me away, was the plot and arc of the story.  As someone who has been exposed to children’s stories for over 40 years, I kept thinking that I knew what was going to happen as Margaret journeyed through her sixth grade year in her new town.  Ah, I said to myself, she will discover that Nancy is rather a nasty person and will find a new set of friends, learning that we must choose our friends for the content of their character.  Ah, she will discover that Philip Leroy, no matter how cute he is, is a louse and that Norman Fishbein, whom she thought was a drip, actually treats her well and is a much better partner for her, learning that we can’t judge people by our first impression.  Ah, she will learn that Laura Danker isn’t stuck up at all, that she is a victim of a system that harms her as much as it does Margaret herself, that girls and women should not be judged by their appearances.  Ah, she will learn that what is most important in religion is one’s personal relationship with one’s deity and not the external trappings of religious services.  Ah, she will learn that her continued desire to be “normal” is a waste of time, that she should be able to accept who she is and let her body grow at its natural pace.

The amazing thing is that none—not one—of these things happens, at least not in any conclusive way.  When I finished the last page, I was at first disappointed, thinking that Blume failed to wrap up a few of her threads.  Then I realized that she failed to wrap up any and all of her threads!  When Margaret wrongfully attacks Laura and realizes that she has hurt Laura’s feelings, she feels rotten.  In her prayers that night she calls herself “the most horrible person who ever lived.”  And then . . . that’s the end of Laura’s role in the novel.  There is no reconciliation.  There is no scene in which Margaret and Laura become friends.  There is no scene in which Margaret defends Laura’s honor by correcting Nancy the next time she says something nasty about Laura.  That’s amazing!  Any other author would feel the need to wrap it up and have the moral spelled out for her young audience.  But not Blume.  There is an incredible trust that she puts in the intelligence and thoughtfulness of her young readers that is beautiful and inspiring.

Laura is just one of many examples of this respect that Blume feels for her reader.  Nancy is revealed to be a liar, and Margaret learns that Nancy can’t be trusted like she thought, but she doesn’t dump Nancy as a friend.  Margaret has learned her lesson and moves on to the next one.  Philip Leroy is pretty awful, and Margaret finally decides that Nancy can have him because Margaret is through with him, but that doesn’t mean she’s running to Norman, who’s nice enough to her and has a crush on her.  We don’t get that closure because life doesn’t have that kind of closure, especially not for a twelve year old.  The same thing happens in Margaret’s religious search.  Nothing gets settled.  Nothing.  Her possible reunion with her mother’s parents is thwarted by their pigheadedness, and her father’s mother is no religious hero, trying just as much to convert young Margaret.

There are dozens of life lessons in this book, but not one moral.  There is not one moment that Blume has Margaret say, “I get it!  I should just be who I am!”  And yet, I bet that nearly every girl that has read this book has understood Nancy’s faults, Philips’s shortcomings, Norman’s redeeming qualities, Laura’s mistreatment, Gretchen’s potentially damaging focus on weight, and Margaret’s double-edged desire to fit in.  What Blume captures here is life and human desires and leaves it all in the hands of her capable readers.  Blume tackles enormous topics like religion and sexuality with ease and moving beauty.  As an adult reading it, I can both ache for Margaret’s ill-placed obsession with hitting puberty even as I understand that that obsession is itself normal.

Our culture is skewed towards telling narratives about young boys who learn what it is to be a man, and not nearly enough stories about the life of young girls.  It is no wonder that young girls flocked to Blume to see common lives of other young women portrayed with humor, love, and empathy.  I love that the first image we get in the novel is of Margaret’s mother sniffing her own armpit to see if her deodorant is working.  From the get go, Blume is telling us that femininity is not going to be cloaked in any kind of glamour.  Women have bodies that aren’t sex objects, but are subjects that stink and bleed.  In the novel, we see mom brushing her teeth and leaning into a cupboard with her butt sticking out and being no different from her husband.  The one sexualized grown woman in the novel is the Playboy centerfold, and that is another moment that Blume offers without comment.  We are allowed to laugh and moan inside and respond how we will.   In an adult novel, that treatment is to be expected (or at least hoped for) but in a children’s novel, it is very rare.  If I had a daughter, I would have every one of Blume’s books on the shelf waiting for her to discover them when she was ready.  I wish now that I had had them on the shelf for my son to find as he was growing up too.