Recently, in a bout of morbid curiosity, I rescued from my parents’ house the stack of diaries that I had religiously kept throughout my teenage years. I was surprised by what I found – the near-daily entries didn't read like the juvenile and mundane scrawlings of the strait-laced secondary school student I remembered. Younger me wrote lucidly about her sexuality; her shortcomings; the complexities of her friendships. She described not only her feelings, but her feelings about her feelings. She did this with more candour than I think I am often capable of as an adult: there was something unabashed and rich about the life I had been living inside of my head.
When adults underestimate children, I think we are often engaging in this kind of flawed self-referencing – not simply minimising “young people” as an abstract group, but revising, patronising and selling short our younger selves. Judy Blume, whose 1975 book Forever has this month been adapted into a Netflix series, was never one to do this. The American author has sold over 82 million copies of her books since the late 1960s, and is credited with having shaped the contemporary young adult genre; she has said that she remembers her childhood vividly. This much is obvious – you only need look at the way that her stories have managed to connect with young people across generations. In Judy Blume Forever, a 2023 Prime Video documentary about the author’s life and career, scores of children in archival footage of book signings marvel at her ability to articulate their thoughts and feelings. One girl says that Blume understands her better than her parents.
