It is a truth universally acknowledged that being a teenage girl sucks. Struggling with a changing body, navigating the schoolyard hierarchies, feeling disconnected from your parents, being sexualised in ways you are both ready and not ready for – like most of my peers, I went through the wringer between the ages of 12 and 18.
When I look at my six-year-old daughter now, I worry about what she’ll have to face in the hormone trenches – but I’m comforted that, like me, she’ll have Judy Blume.
From the crippling insecurities of being 10 in Otherwise Known as Sheila The Great to virginity loss in Forever …, Blume’s novels shepherded me through adolescence like a beloved family member. I grew up in Sudan and then Brighton in the 90s and 00s, but never questioned the fact that these stories, set in the US of the 70s and 80s, were written for me – gifts from Blume to guide me through my specific struggles. Watching the new documentary about Blume and the upcoming film adaptation of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, I felt almost betrayed as I saw that my intimate parasocial relationship with her was shared by so many other people. But slowly, hearing from friend after friend that “I do not know how I would have coped with being 13 without her”, I began to see her work as something even more special: a spiderweb of support that bonded every reader of the more than 90m books she has sold.
The wall-to-wall interviews, tributes, and other coverage of the new film and documentary are a testament to her ongoing relevance, and to the fact that teenage girls need her more than ever. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is probably Blume’s most beloved novel, finally adapted for the screen nearly 50 years after the book’s publication and directed by The Edge Of Seventeen’s Kelly Fremon Craig. With mixed Jewish and Christian heritage, Margaret Simon has to contend with spiritual confusion, a move to the suburbs, and her teacher mother becoming a housewife; all while desperately wanting her breasts to develop and her period to start.
It’s so easy to be ashamed of those feelings as a teenager, and to believe that making yourself small and hiding your problems is the only way to cope. Reading them brought to life in a story and treated as worthy, commendable even, is revolutionary. The film also brings to life the struggles of Margaret’s mother, who has become my surrogate as an approaching-middle-age woman on the perpetual cusp of burnout. I saw my past and present on the screen and the enduring struggles of womanhood.
Blume’s 1973 book Deenie became one of the most frequently challenged books in the American library system because the protagonist masturbates. It is a deeply empathetic look at embracing your perceived flaws and growing into autonomy. As well as assuring young women like me that you don’t just have to be who your parents tell you you are, it normalised and gently reassured readers that budding interest in sex wasn’t inherently shameful. It still does.
Most controversially of all, there was 1975’s Forever… in which 18-year-old Katherine falls in love for the first time and has sex with her boyfriend, Michael. I read that book at 14 and remember being confused that it doesn’t end with a Disney happily-ever-after. Katherine and Michael don’t ride off into the sunset, nor is she punished for enjoying touching and being touched by Michael. Instead, Katherine decides she is not ready for a long-term commitment, flirts with a tennis instructor named Theo and eventually resolves to be single. Having been so used to stories where landing a man is seen as the ultimate goal, it blew the patriarchal dust out of the crevices of my teenage mind.
Blume chipped away at taboos that still persist, and showed young women’s inner turmoil and sexuality outside the male gaze. And for all that society has somewhat progressed past the Reagan-era puritanism that sought to censor her, and Blume has gone from controversial figure to a bona fide international treasure, the themes in Are You There God? Its Me, Margaret still resonate. The existential dread she goes through, the bond with her grandmother, the thrill of first kisses, budding breasts and blood-stained knickers. There’s still shame and silence around the deepest fears and desires of being a young woman. In some ways, social media has only enhanced the pressure to perform the correct sort of coming-of-age, and every dorky misstep has the potential to exist for ever on the internet.
Seeing those struggles on the page means you are not alone – someone out there gets it. Being a teenage girl may still suck, but it would suck a lot more if it weren’t for Judy Blume.
Leila Latif is a freelance writer and critic
