Blume-a-thon #6: It's Not the End of the World

Judy Blume will be speaking at the University of Hartford on June 21st as a fundraiser for The Mark Twain House & Museum. I’ll be interviewing her onstage and taking tons of audience questions. In preparation, I will be reading her complete works and blogging about the experience. Get your tickets here.  At a certain point in a Judy Blume read-a-thon, the reader is tempted to start referring to the books as "the period one," "the teen sex one," "the racism one," and now, "the divorce one."

It's Not the End of the World was published in 1972, right in the middle of the "divorce revolution." Due in large part to the no-fault divorce laws that began to go into effect in 1970s, the divorce rate doubled. (With that, a Stanford study shows, domestic violence rates and the female suicide rate plummeted. Go feminism!) It's Not the End of the World must have felt at the time like both a realistic novel, and a frank portrayal of divorce's effects on children.

Responsible as ever, Judy Blume first sets out to demonstrate the effect of an unhappy marriage on children. We read from Karen's point of view as her parents burst into tears over small conflicts, and then argue in the other room.

"No, I won't! You never looked at me as a person. I have feelings... I have ideas... did you ever stop to think about that?"

Amy ran into the kitchen then. She was crying. Uncle Dan picked her up and held her to him. 

"Now you listen to me," Daddy shouted. 

"No!" Mom hollered. "I'm tired of listening to you."

"And I'm tired of the whole business. You don't know what you want. You never did. And you never will! Because you never grew up! You're still Ruth's baby!"

There was an awful crash in the living room then and I ran in to see what happened. One of Mom's best china babies was on the floor, smashed, like the mocha-icing cake. 

"That's how you settle all your problems, isn't it?" Daddy said with a terrible laugh. "Just like a two-year-old."

Mom started to cry. She bent down and tried to pick up the pieces of her antique. I think it was the first time she ever broke anything she loved.

In this scene, we really get a glimpse of Judy's future writing about adult women. It's as if all of her books take place in one whole, real world, and the perspective is constantly rotating. We know that Karen's dad is right. We also know that Karen's mom is right. Tragically, there is really no clear answer or resolution to these conflicts, no hero in this story. There is only Karen watching as her brother Jeff withdraws, her parents fall apart, and her little sister, Amy, provides unwanted comic relief ("he has pimples on his face. that's zits if you don't already know") as little kids are wont to do.

At this point, certain habits and motifs are beginning to show up in Judy's work. Grandparents are again on hand to actively participate in the child's life, just like Margaret's grandma coming to visit from New York and Tony's grandma retreating to her bedroom. Friends are starting to show up based on circumstance, and on those circumstances real friendships are made. Karen befriends a girl named Val whose mother has been divorced for a little longer than Karen's, and takes the newly distraught Karen under her wise pre-teen wing. These relationships ring true: this is how real friends are formed when we're kids. Some kinds of friends have experienced our pain just a bit before us, and by seeming worldly-wise helping us they help themselves. I'd also be remiss if I did not mention that the portrayal of the cat, Mew, as a vitally important comforting presence, is so realistic that I missed my own childhood cats Muffin and Pumpkin deeply while reading this book. Holding a cat and crying: there's nothing like it.

And how real is this fear? I feel this every day:

I have started to mark my days again. I am back to C-. I just had an awful thought. Suppose there aren't any more A+ days once you get to be twelve? Wouldn't that be something! To spend the rest of your life looking for an A+ day and not finding it.

Judy Blume did not get divorced herself until 1976. I am curious, of course, why she wrote about it so far before her own separation, but that doesn't really matter. The truth is probably something like this: divorce and its children were probably saturating the media at the time. As the comforting, realistic writer who children could turn to, perhaps she felt she needed to address it honestly. I'm sure there were many kids who were glad she did.

Blume-a-thon #5: Freckle Juice

Judy Blume will be speaking at the University of Hartford on June 21st as a fundraiser for The Mark Twain House & Museum. I’ll be interviewing her onstage and taking tons of audience questions. In preparation, I will be reading her complete works and blogging about the experience. Get your tickets here.  When I was a kid there were two things I wanted very badly and for no reason: freckles and curly hair. This desire stemmed solely from whatever gene sets off random bouts of envy in children.

Freckle Juice will take you half an hour to read and is a great Cliff's Notes to Judy Blume's style and concerns. Boy wants freckles. Boy falls for freckle-based prank. Boy makes best of it, with the help of an adult who knows when not to push kids too hard. (I like these adults that often show up in Judy's novels. I expect she's this kind of parent herself.)

In this little book (seven year old Julia would call this a "chapter book," because it is divided into dramatic chapters, each about four pages long), Judy Blume starts moving into the comic world she'll plow right into when we hit Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. She's a loving authorial mother to poor old jealous Andrew. She takes his concerns and his jealousy seriously, and then she makes him have a sense of humor about himself. Would that all kids could!

I never got my freckles. It took several years of getting terrible sunburns to realize this would never happen. I gave up on curling my hair, too. Once in a while, though, I put on the Freckle Juice of the adult woman: I make my eyelids darker and my eyelashes longer, my cheeks pinker, my lips brighter. But it usually ends up rubbing off from the wind going by the Vespa, an unexpected rain, the sweat of a long day, or rubbing it off by accident from sheer stress. Freckle Juice and curling irons wear off. And then we've got to live with and laugh at what's underneath: our normal selves, just as jealous and silly as when we were kids.

Blume-a-thon #4: Then Again, Maybe I Won't

Judy Blume will be speaking at the University of Hartford on June 21st as a fundraiser for The Mark Twain House & Museum. I'll be interviewing her onstage and taking tons of audience questions. In preparation, I will be reading her complete works and blogging about the experience. Get your tickets here.  My brother is very quiet and often indecisive. He's now twenty-five, so he's settled into adulthood as a kind and thoughtful introvert, but when he was a teenager the rest of my family said more than once, "Alex, what do you want? This or this? What's your plan? What are you going to do?"

There is a distinct lack of writing about boys who are not leaders. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) As a kid I read a lot about boys who survived alone in the wild, trained dogs, performed magic, solved mysteries, and otherwise took charge when adults were gone. I loved-- and still love--reading boy-centered books, because cool stuff tended to happen. You could wash up on shore with a black stallion and tame it to be your own. I was into that sort of thing.

I never read Then Again, Maybe I Won't until this project, and I was surprised at how real the character's internal struggles felt to me. As in the case of Margaret, Tony is subjected to the drama of his own body, his parents' moving (moving is often the biggest event in a child's life, and is a frequent catalyst for change in Blume's books), issues of class, and some stressful friends. Nocturnal emissions are the least of his problems. His best buddy shoplifts, his parents have recently become New Money, and his grandmother is retreating to her bedroom on a permanent basis. All of this makes Tony angry and occasionally he resists.

So I said, "Maybe she'd get some fresh air if you'd let her go back to doing the cooking."

"How would that look to the neighbors?" my mother asked. "Like she's the maid or something!"

And I said "who cares about the neighbors!"

"Grandma's worked hard all her life," my mother said. "Now it's time for her to take it easy and enjoy herself."

"She doesn't act like she's enjoying it," I argued. 

"Of course she is! Doesn't she love the color TV?"

"How do I know?" I said.

"Well, she watches it all day doesn't she?" My mother bent over to pick a piece of lint off the carpet. 

Besides the occasional confrontation with his mother, Tony is largely passive. He has a fantasy of what he might do to correct the immoral actions of others around him, but he by and large ends up talking himself out of it with a dismissive "Then again, maybe I won't." This indecisive mental move is used for everthing, positive and negative, and eventually Tony's mind is so torn up he starts having anxiety attacks. When he catches his best friend shoplifting he thinks:

I was furious. I mean really furious! I wanted to punch Joel in the nose. I wanted to mess up his angel face-- to see the blood ooze out of his nostrils and trickle down his chin. I wanted to look him in the eye and say, "I've had it with you, Joel! You stink! Who do you think you're fooling? You think I'm afraid to tell the manager, don't you! Well, I'm not!" Then I'd beckon with my finger and call "Sir... sir....."

 

.... my picture would be on the front page of the Rosemont Weekly... 

 

Soon after I would be beaten up in the boys' bathroom and left bleeding on the cold floor. My attackers would never be caught and I would live in fear forever...

When we left the store Joel was still smiling but I was doubled over in pain.

This is a very true and simple story: Tony does not know what to do, so he does nothing. Things eventually resolve without his actions or non-actions playing much of a part. But he is there, all along, watching, weighing, deciding what to do. Or then again, what not to do. It's a reminder that the introverts around us are as affected by events as those of us screaming, crying, and blogging--they just might be holding it in, working it out on their own. I think many more boys have this experience than just Tony and my brother. If I ever have a boy, I'll keep it in mind. Before I send him out into the woods with a Hatchet and an eagle, I'll ask him what he thinks. And I'll listen.

Then again, maybe I... just kidding. I definitely will.

Blume-a-Thon #3: Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret

I have a distinct memory of reading Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret in my newly-painted pink bedroom, closing the book in the middle of a chapter, walking straight across the hall to my mother, and asking her something about periods. She responded frankly and we talked about it for a minute, and the I went back to reading the book. I don't remember what I asked my mother-- certainly by then I knew the basics, the where, how, and why of the thing-- but girls are much more concerned with when will it happen? Who will I be afterwords? What will it feel like? And, most importantly, will it hurt and how badly?

It is cruel, in retrospect, for this rite of passage to come completely out of your control. It could be anytime in about a five-year span, at the beach, at school, at home, in your sleep (if you're lucky). Unlike bat mitzvahs and school dances and first kisses, there is nothing you can do to speed or slow or personalize the process. Your body just does something, and you get the credit. Congrats! You're a woman now.

Judy Blume is one of the only people, in my mind, to truly accept and dramatize this waiting. If you haven't read it, Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret encompasses one sixth-grade year in the lives of Margaret, Nancy, Jane, and Gretchen. In its pages it contains a huge amount of little moments that ring true to any twelve-year-old-girl, such as:

"My mother went to the counter and told the saleslady we were interested in a bra. I stood back and pretended not to know a thing. I even bent down to scratch a new mosquito bite."

Yup. That was me, every time my mom took me anywhere that was deeply important to me. Moms. How do they always know what to do, even when we're completely silent on the matter?

But despite the popular fact that this book directly addresses the anxieties girls have around periods, bras, boob development (we must, we must, we must increase our bust), seven minutes in heaven (I'm suddenly wondering if the continued prevalence of this game is entirely due to the prevalence of this book), the complex world of female friendship, and boys in general, the real subject of this little novel is religion.

Margaret is half-Jewish and half-Christian, but since religion detroyed her parents' relationships with their families, she is raised as "No religion." (Her words.) She prays-- see the title-- conversationally, asking for no one to find out she's put six cotton balls in her training bra. She embarks on a quest, a school project to find out what church and temple are really like, and she talks to God about these things with a sincere directness that rang true to me, and, I suspect, to a lot of other young girls.

Are you there God? It's me, Margaret. I just came home from church. I loved the choir-- the songs were so beautiful. Still, I didn't really feel you God. I'm more confused than ever. I'm trying hard to understand but I wish you'd help me a little. If only you could give me a hint God. Which religion should I be? Sometimes I wish I'd been born one way or the other.

Her parents and grandparents, as in all Judy Blume books, are drawn carefully and with complexity. They have adult conversations right over Margaret's head, with some lines I'm sure I did not understand when I was ten:

(Margaret's father, raised Jewish, angrily explaining why his wife's Christian parents suddenly want to visit after a decade of estrangement:) "They want to see Margaret! To make sure she doesn't have horns!"

Margaret thinks, during another adult conversation: "I didn't want to listen anymore. How could they talk that way in front of me! Didn't they know I was a real person-- with feelings of my own!"

Judy Blume is the first author whose name I remember knowing. These books were written by a person who had given them quite a lot of thought. She had a lot of answers, Judy did, and she wasn't afraid to ask a lot of questions without answering them.

It's easy to talk about puberty-- or religion-- or friendship-- or love-- or school-- to just about any woman you are close to. It's easy to think about these things, and how they affect our lives, one at a time. But we often forget as adults, when the years start to run together and our resolutions are singular and often small ("this year I'm going to lose twenty pounds," or "this year I'm going to get a promotion"), that when you're twelve, everything happens at once. You move to a new town and your body changes, your friends change, your religion is called into question, you start kissing people, your grandparents and

your parents have all sorts of expectations of you. Every school year, you remake yourself, willingly or unwillingly.

Nothing really happens in this book. There is no divorce, no drama, no death, no magic, no breakups. But it doesn't need them. For a twelve-year-old girl, just living through the year is a story all its own.

Blume-a-thon #2: Iggie's House

30 Days to Judy Blume's arrival at The Mark Twain House & Museum. I continue to be thrilled. Let the Blume-a-thon continue!

   Iggie's House, published in 1970, is Blume's first real chapter book. Told from the perspective of a young white girl in the New Jersey suburbs, the story describes the series of events in a neighborhood when the first black family moves to town.

   Winifred is a precocious, curious tomboy, desperate for companionship after her best friend (Iggie) moves across the world to Japan. Think Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. But, while there are many Scouts in the world-- children who haven't completely codified the ideals and ideas of previous generations-- there are far fewer Atticus Finches. Winnie's parents vascillate between acceptance and rejection of the new family.

   "Listen to me, Winifred," Mrs. Barringer argued. "These people must have known they'd have problems to face when they moved here." 

   "Well, why don't you help them solve their problems?" Winnie screamed. "I don't see how you and Daddy can just sit there day after day doing nothing. Are you against the Garbers?"

   Mrs. Barringer did not reply.

   "Well, are you?" Winnie asked again.

   "No, Winnie," her mother answered in a calm voice. "We are definitely not against the Garbers."

   "Then why don't you do something?" Winnie repeated.

   "Because it really isn't any of our business, Winnie. Your father and I don't believe in getting mixed up in other people's lives. These things will work themselves out. Daddy and I are not crusaders."

   "What do you mean crusaders?" Winnie asked, baffled.

   "That's what you are Winnie. You're a crusader. Always finding a new cause and them jumping right in to fight for it. You're like Mrs. Landon in a way."

  Of all of Blume's books, this early work has the closest relationship to Twain. Winnie is Huck Finn less than a hundred years in the future: a white kid grappling with race in her community, and in her own head. Winnie (very realistically) is not color-blind-- instead, she considers the Garbers an exciting addition to her community, as well as an opportunity for her to prove how open-minded she herself is.

   The best aspect of the book is the variety of reactions of the Garber children to Winnie and their other neighbors. One of them reacts exactly the way the reader might.

  "Thank you Lord for sending the Garber family this Great Do-Gooder, Winifred. Now that she's discovered us, she's going to save us, Lord. All by herself! After after we're gone, Lord... then she'll be able to tell everyone how she's had black friends. Now isn't that wonderful! I ask you Lord... isn't that just too..."

   But Blume doesn't use one particular character as a proxy for entire subset of the population. Another of the Garber children acts as a mediator between the frustrated, sarcastic Herbie and Winnie herself.

   "Look, all Herbie means is he doesn't think you'd be so interested in us if we weren't black. He doesn't want to be used by somebody who thinks it's groovy to have black friends."

   These passages, and many more, rang true to me as an adult. Without much literary hand-holding, Blume sketches out a whole community of people dealing with issues of race. For each new character, large and small, there is a slight difference in perspective. Mr. Garber wants to move away and live in a less hostile environment; Mrs. Garber wants the family to stand their ground. Winnie's parents change their minds over and over. There are no clear conclusions in the book, and no clear winners, either.

   It is extraordinary to think that books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are about children grappling with race in circumstances that most of their real-world peers will never come close to. Faking your own death and floating down a river? Witnessing a rape trial? I love these books, but they are almost like fairy tales brought to us to show us something larger. But Iggie's House is a series of ordinary moments in the late 1960's, starring a truly ordinary girl. She must navigate these waters without a raft; she must put her neighbors and family on trial without a lawyer. These are the real thoughts we have had to face as a nation, and these are the conversations that we are still reluctant to have.

Judy Blume will speak at the University of Hartford as a fundraiser for the Mark Twain House on June 21st, 2012. Tickets at www.hartford.edu/hart.

Blume-a-thon #1: The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo

I am reading the collected works of Judy Blume for reasons I detail here. You're in luck: this is the first one. You haven't missed anything yet. Poor Freddy. He's in the middle of an impressive older brother and an adorable younger sister. Every day of his life is something like Alexander's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad day. He can't do anything right. We know how it is.

This is Blume's first book, and is a very simple picture book. My edition is 39 pages of both large text and illustration. Each chapter is perhaps 300 words. Basic plot: Freddy feels lonely and un-special as a middle child. He signs up for the school play because it's something his brother had never done, and despite being too little for a speaking part, is cast as a Green Kangaroo. The Green Kangaroo. He practices hopping around and does a great job, and basically finds his niche.

I was not a middle child, but I owned this book when I was young. I remember feeling connected to Freddy's need to do his own thing, and many years after I read it, I experienced a very similar theatrical awakening. What Blume does well here is what she always does well: she expresses the worries of kids in a respectful and believable way. She knows that if a seven year old were really cast as a green kangaroo, they'd have a busy two weeks practicing hopping. She knows that green freckles might be sort of overwhelming. She knows that this moment of self-reflection and of transformation is real for every actor, right before opening night: "He jumped over to the mirror. He looked at himself. He really felt like a Green Kangaroo."

Everything turns out great, of course, though we don't get the details of the play-- just what it was like to be Freddy within the Kangaroo. It ends, of course, on a happy note: Freddy was happy being Freddy. We knew it would go this way.

But look at this illustration (by Amy Aitken). Freddy's brother and sister are sliding into their own private jealousy. These are themes-- jealousy, rivalry, the ambiguity of sucess-- that Blume will return to again and again. Yes, this is her first and simplest, but there are hints of Judy throughout this story. Just wait until she puts these sorts of unreliable narrators in situations with much more social meaning and ambiguity.

Blume-a-thon!

During Banned Book Week last fall, my coworker Mallory and I got to talking about our favorite censored authors. There are, of course, the high-profile scandals-- Salman Rushdie, J.D. Salinger, and of course, my employer, Mark Twain. Lots of people are also aware the Harry Potter series has been widely banned for promoting an evil lifestyle (wizardry is so insidious, isn't it?). Major fans of Banned Book Week, however, know that the big stars of the censorship discussion are children's book authors. If only I could tell Madeline L'Engle, who died in 2007, what a profound effect her strange books about physics and faith had on me. If only I could tell Dr. Suess, who died in 1991, how much of my moral compass was formed by the boldness of his work. If only I could tell Shel Silverstein, who died in 1999, how fabulous his bizarreness was, and how it opened a lot of dark and awesome avenues in my young brain. If only I could tell Judy Blume...

Oh, wait. I could. Judy Blume is alive and well and actively speaking against censorship at every chance she gets. (See my post about heroes a while back-- I think I finally have an answer.)

So I decided I would tell her. She's very active on twitter-- she tweeted eight times on Thursday, talking to her fans, talking about how much she, too, loved Beverly Cleary (also still alive), telling us what she's writing, and chatting about the hilariousness of spray on makeup. She's great. She always was, and she still is.

So I wrote Judy Blume an email asking her to come and visit us at the Mark Twain House. As I was writing it, I began to get very emotional. I realized that because of Judy (and all the aforementioned authors, as well as several more), I loved to read from a very early age. And because I loved to read I loved to write. And because of both of those things, I have this blog, I have this podcast, I have a BA in Literature and an MFA in Writing, and I work at Mark Twain's house.

I said all this in a weepy yet, I must assume, professional email. We send these sorts of requests out all the time-- at least twice a week. The response rate is perhaps 2%.

But Judy responded. Responded saying she wanted to come. As my coworkers can describe, I melted away with joy and have been overjoyed ever since. It was a secret for a long time, that Judy was coming, and now it's been announced, and every time I tell a person between the ages of twenty and forty-five, they too melt away. We will sell many tickets to our Judy Blume moderated discussion. But it gets better.

I'm the moderator.

Judy and I, hanging out on stage, talking about books and writing and censorship and Twain and who knows what else. I can't wait. It's going to be on June 21st and you can find out more event information here.

So, in order to prepare, I'm going to be reading the entire collected works of Judy Blume. I already have them all (there may or may not have been a buying spree online moments after finding out I was moderating). The best part is: I'll be writing a little blog piece about each and every one, mulling them over and coming up with my discussion questions. And you, dear readers, can help me, if you'd like.

If you're not familiar with her writing, I promise you it is worth an academic look. It's incredible to think about the sheer number of children's anxieties and problems that she wrote about. (This is why she was banned.)

I can't wait. I hope you can't either. Keep a look out for the "Blume-a-thon" tags in my posts. And see you on June 21st.