Different for girls

Judy Blume‘s chronicles of female adolescence in the 1970s still resonate today – and her best-loved character, Margaret, is about to hit cinemas

- Anna Fazackerley

 

‘It felt like she was writing for me.” It is a sentiment I hear over and over again, talking to women in their 40s and 50s about the American writer Judy Blume, one of the world’s bestselling authors, who started writing young adult fiction in the 1970s, when that genre was still in its infancy.

As a 12-year-old growing up in Bath, western England, my Judy moment – discovering her novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which is due to be released as a film worldwide in the coming weeks – was revelatory. There I was, feeling like the only girl in school who might never grow a decent pair of boobs or start her periods. (At 46, I’m still waiting for the boobs.) Then along came Margaret. Never mind that she was living more than a decade earlier; she was feeling the same anxieties, and everything she felt was right there on the page.

“I loved her immediately because she was writing about what it was really like to be a girl, worrying about bras, periods and crushes,” says the novelist Emily Barr.

Until she “found Judy”, Barr had been existing on a diet of Malory Towers, Enid Blyton’s wholesome boarding school novels. “Those girls did get older but they basically stayed like children in this sanitised world,” she says. “ Daryl Rivers definitely didn’t ever have a period.” Then Barr found Margaret and her friends, chanting “I must, I must improve my bust” in the hope they would grow to fill their new bras, and everything changed.