Writer Alex Poppe joins us to talk about Deenie, Judy Blume’s 1973 novel about a girl, pigeonholed as the pretty one in her family, whose life is thrown off track when she’s diagnosed with scoliosis. Alex is the author most recently of the memoir Breakfast Wine.
In the first episode of Rereading Our Childhood, Mary Grace and Deborah revisit Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume’s classic 1970 novel about adolescence. You can listen to this episode here.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is narrated by Margaret, a sixth-grader who has just moved from New Jersey to New York. Margaret’s father is Jewish and her mother was brought up Christian and she is being raised without a religion, which leaves her wondering where she fits in. Meanwhile, she and her friends are preoccupied with bras and boys and are eagerly waiting to get their periods. In this episode, Mary Grace and Deborah discuss the impact of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Blume’s other books on their own adolescent selves and how the book held up on rereading. They also talk about the Judy Blume moment currently underway, with a feature film of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and the Amazon Prime documentaryJudy Blume Foreverrecently released, and about Blume’s activism against book banning.
As Mary Grace and Deborah discuss, different covers over the years have presented Margaret in different ways, from the pensive girl sitting on her bed on the original edition,
to the blond Margaret on the 1970s paperback edition, who looks nothing like the Margaret in the book,
to the current paperback edition, where Margaret is anachronistically texting God on a cellphone (and he seems to be writing back),
to the movie tie-in with Margaret adjusting her shoe, presumably from the scene where she gets blisters walking to school without socks after her awful friend Nancy tells her that no one in sixth grade wears them.
Forever, the much-banned book about a teenage sexual relationship
As Mary Grace and Deborah discuss, Judy Blume’s books are often banned. An April 2023 PEN America report includes Blume’s novel Forever… on a list of books that have recently been removed from school libraries in the United States.
Here’s the New York Times article Mary Grace mentioned about the Judy Blume book-to-screen moment currently underway. (Clarification: It’s from the business section.)
As Mary Grace notes, Judy Blume demonstrated the famous “I must, I must, I must increase my bust” exercise on a TV program (HuffPost Live).
Recommended for fans of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret:
Freaky Fridayby Mary Rodgers, the hilarious story of a New York teenager who wakes up and discovers she’s been turned into her mother
The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, the sequel to Harriet the Spy and one of the few books from the era other than Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret to feature a girl getting her first period
If you haven’t had enough discussion of Margaret’s adolescent travails, there’s a great segment on the book on First Edition, a new podcast from the always interesting Book Riot team. They also have a substack critiquing the book’s covers.
Rereading Our Childhood 