I decided that my situation wasn’t complex, weird, or awkward. I managed my feelings about the brace with the ultimate anti-Blume strategy: denial. I could’ve told Judy Blume a thing or two about what it’s like to go through the most awkward years of your life covered in hard plastic and metal from armpits to thigh. I lived through it 23 hours a day for three years. A few well-meaning people recommended it, but I argued that I didn’t need to read about the pain, humiliation and inconvenience of wearing a brace. So it should resonate as a surprise that, when I got my back brace at age 14, I avoided reading Deenie, Judy Blume’s seminal book on the subject. Pre-teen life was complicated and weird, but by addressing it so straightforwardly, Blume made it feel a bit more manageable. Blume’s clear, unselfconscious prose made it seem normal to think about sex, to ask questions about religion, to worry whether your boobs were big enough. Judy Blume was interwoven with my tween years as much as slam books, homework, and awkward flirtation with boys. By eighth grade, I’d giggled over the sex scenes of Foreverwith my friends so many times the little paperback book fell open automatically to those passages. I pored over Are you There God? It’s Me Margaret several times in sixth grade. Judy Blume Was Right: On Reading Deenie TwiceĮVEN BEFORE I OFFICIALLY hit adolescence I’d read and loved most of Judy Blume’s books. A roundtable discussion about Judy Blume featuring Nell Beram, Nina Berry and Andrea Kleine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |