Pico and Fleshman were successful, but the storm was still coming. By the spring of 1980, book challenges were prevalent enough that another popular children’s book author, Betty Miles, used them as a starting point for a young adult novel. In Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book, eleven-year-old Kate Harris finds herself at the center of a town-wide controversy when she signs up for a new program to read aloud to the students in a first-grade classroom. After meeting one of the boys and hearing him rave about his new pet puppy, Kate carefully chooses a picture book that she hopes will appeal to her pint-sized listeners.
The Birthday Dog—a story that Miles invented—is about a little boy named Benjamin who wants a puppy for his birthday. The neighbor’s dog Blackie is pregnant. Just when Blackie is about to give birth, the neighbor calls over Benjamin and his father to watch. Benjamin gets to pick out a puppy from her litter and names it Happy, for making his birthday wish come true.
The kids love the book, just as Kate anticipated. They’re particularly excited by the page, and the picture, where Blackie starts popping out her pups. “Just then, Blackie gave a little moan, and her stomach began to ripple,” Kate reads to her rapt audience. “A small, wet shape began to come out of Blackie… She pushed hard again, until all of it was out.”
After the story is finished, the kids are bursting with questions. “How did the puppy get in there… inside his mommy,” one child asks Kate, who nervously eyes the teacher to see how she should answer. When the teacher gives her an encouraging nod, she carefully begins to explain things. “Before the puppy begins, the father dog and the mother dog mate,” Kate says. “And this little tiny thing called a sperm goes into the mother—”
“Into her vagina!” another child shouts, before the kids erupt with chatter about their body parts.
At the end of their allotted time together, Kate leaves the classroom feeling sheepish but proud of how she handled herself. The teacher, Mrs. Dwyer, reassures her. “Kids this age can be embarrassingly frank! But I don’t want them to think there’s anything wrong with their natural curiosity.”
Kate continues on with her week, unaware that she’s just set off a firestorm. The following Monday, she’s called into the principal’s office to discuss the incident. Her principal tells her that the elementary school received a number of calls from concerned parents, saying that they were unhappy with the topic of dogs mating being brought up with their children. A community-wide standoff ensues. Parents flock to the local library, trying to take out The Birthday Dog. Kate learns that one mother confronted the librarian, telling her that “it was a crime to spend public funds on smut like that!”
Kate finds it funny, at first. After all, the title in question is just a picture book about a little boy who wants a new pet. But the angry faction won’t back down. They write letters to the editor of the local newspaper, slamming a world where “innocent sixth-grade children [are] being required to describe reproduction.” They camp out in front of the grocery store and urge townspeople to join their new coalition, called Parents United for Decency. “You’ve probably heard,” the ringleader tells Kate’s mother, unaware of her connection to the incident, “that only last week the little first-grade children at Concord School were subjected to a book that displayed a birth scene in explicit detail.”
Maudie, who is Kate’s friend and co-volunteer in the first-grade classroom, convinces Kate to stand up for herself at an upcoming school board meeting. “I’m Kate Harris,” she announces in front of the board and a packed audience. “I’m the one who read that book to the kids at Concord. I’m not ashamed of it,” she goes on. “I think everyone in this room should read the whole thing before they criticize it… it’s not dirty… It’s educational!”
Kate’s speech sways the tide of the meeting. The board votes unanimously to allow the reading project to continue, and the Parents United for Decency group eventually dissolves. “Democracy is exhausting,” Kate determines after she gets home from the meeting. Still, it’s well worth it, the novel implies.
Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book isn’t the subtlest story, but it speaks directly to young readers about an issue that was becoming more and more prevalent in the early 1980s. In publishing it, Miles was fighting back.
Betty Miles—who also had a hit book about friendship and divorce called The Trouble with Thirteen—and Blume had a good pal in common: the novelist Norma Klein. “Norma Klein was my first writer friend,” Blume told Terry Gross in an interview on Fresh Air in 2023. “And the two of us were banned together. Always. Norma and Judy, Norma and Judy.” Early after the inception of Banned Books Week by the American Library Association in 1982, their headshots both appeared on a poster with black lines covering their mouths. The other silenced authors? Maya Angelou, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and William Shakespeare, among other greats.
Klein was a New York native who grew up in Manhattan and never learned to drive. Her parents had been communist activists when they were younger and her father worked as a Freudian psychoanalyst. When Judy lived across the bridge in New Jersey, she and Norma would meet for long lunches. After Judy moved out west to New Mexico, they maintained their relationship via long, intimate letters.
A reserved brunette, Klein got her start publishing short stories in the 1960s, before she penned two successful books for children: Mom, the Wolf Man and Me, a YA novel, and Girls Can Be Anything, a picture book for younger readers. Wolf Man, which came out in 1972, is about Brett Levin, an adolescent girl growing up with an artistic single mother, who takes Brett to protests and lectures her about feminism. In an amusing role reversal, Brett wishes her mom was more conventional and sets her up on dates, hoping she’ll settle down and get married.
Girls Can Be Anything has a more obvious agenda. In the 1973 book, two children named Marina and Adam bicker about the roles they get to inhabit in their games of pretend. Adam bosses Marina around, telling her that because he’s a boy and she’s a girl, he gets to be the doctor while she has to be the nurse. He’s the pilot, she’s the stewardess, according to Adam. He’s the president and she’s first lady.
In between their playdates, Marina tells her parents about Adam’s demands and they assure her that he’s wrong. “Well, that’s just plain silly!” her father says when Marina shares that Adam told her women can’t be doctors. “Why, your Aunt Rosa is a doctor. You know that.” Bolstered by her family, Marina bravely stands up to Adam. “Adam, you know, you can be a pilot or a doctor… I’m going to be the first woman President!”
Adam is skeptical. “It seems like according to you girls can be anything they want,” he says.
“Well, that’s just the way it is now,” Marina answers before they work it out, each giving their presidential talks and celebrating with a dinner of potato chips, lollipops, and marshmallows.
Klein, who died in 1989 at the age of fifty, dedicated the book to her daughter. “To Jenny,” it reads, “who, when she grows up, would like to be a painter, join the circus, and work at Baskin-Robbins, making ice cream cones.”
Jenny is Jennifer Fleissner—not an acrobat or an ice cream vendor but today a gender studies professor at Indiana University Bloomington. Fleissner said that like Judy, her mother didn’t set out to be shocking with anything she wrote. “She was a very strong feminist,” said Fleissner, who is the older of Klein’s two daughters. “I think she would have said that the primary thing she was interested in writing about was writing honestly about sexuality and trying to do so in a way that was not shaming.”
In her 1976 novel Hiding, Klein does just that. The novel is about an eccentric aspiring ballet dancer named Krii, who is struggling with how she wants to be a woman in the world. At eighteen, she moves to London ostensibly to attend a dance academy, but also to get away from her unusual family. Her mother and father are still together but live apart on separate continents, tethered by their children and what sounds like an open marriage. Her older sister lives on a commune and keeps popping out babies. “Here is Mother with her Planned Parenthood meetings. And there is Paula with the six kids… living in the kind of cheerful squalor I had only read about in books,” Krii says. She describes herself as “the silent, clinging, frightened one. I always knew, from the time that I had any thoughts on the subject, that I would never marry and never have children.”
Yet Krii’s offbeat, enigmatic vibe proves irresistible to Jonathan, a handsome redheaded choreographer. She loses her virginity to him soon after they start dating—she’s not burning with desire for him exactly, but she’s definitely curious about sex. She’s also aware she has anxiety about intercourse and wants to get past it. “I was afraid of the potential for failure and humiliation,” she tells the reader. “At least with masturbation you can’t disappoint anyone.”
She gives her body to Jonathan and then is miffed when it seems as if he wants access to her inner life, too. “Where are you when we make love?” he asks her one morning. Krii is offended. “What am I guilty of? It’s true I don’t shriek out four-letter words when I come. I probably move tentatively and slowly. I don’t have to be wiped off the ceiling afterward.” Despite Jonathan’s attempts to crack her open, Krii won’t—or can’t—climb out of her shell. They break up and Jonathan quickly marries her outgoing classmate, seemingly on a whim. Krii is hurt but she has trouble expressing that, too. “People say: Take off your mask,” Krii explains. “But beneath that mask is another mask and beneath that another. They want to think it can be done by one simple gesture of abandon, but I’m afraid that in my case that won’t work.”
Hiding isn’t an upbeat novel, but it is truthful. The ending implies that Krii is making peace with her mother and father and might let herself open up after all.
“I think she wanted to take the pleasure of girls seriously,” Fleissner said of Klein. “I think she also just felt that usually the exploration of sex by young people was a kind of fumbling, awkward, complicated scenario and just wanted to show it to people, warts and all, as just sort of a part of human life.”
Klein explained that mission in a 1977 article called “Growing Up Human: The Case for Sexuality in Children’s Books.” Published in the journal Children’s Literature in Education, the first-person essay argues against the popular belief that kids are not ready to read about certain topics, such as sex. Klein begins by sharing that in her personal life, she’s as conventional as they come. Married to Erwin Fleissner, a biologist and cancer researcher, and living on the Upper West Side, she writes that she “sometimes fear[s] that my husband and I will be hauled off to the Museum of Natural History to be put on display as one of the last examples of the happily monogamous middle class couple.” She goes on to say that, nevertheless, she’s drawn to stories about nontraditional families: “the kinds of complex family situations that exist now and that perhaps did not exist in quite the same way ten or thirty years ago.”
Unlike these nontraditional setups—same-sex parents, for instance, or mothers and fathers with openly open marriages—sexuality is not new. Sex, she argues, is a core part of the human experience, but has been lumped into the crowded category of topics that adults prefer to hide from their children, probably because mothers and fathers don’t feel comfortable talking about them. She says she’s happy that books have started doing the work of promoting these conversations, and the criticism that authors are exposing young readers to unnecessarily difficult subject matter is nothing short of naive.
“Some of the things we are writing about today are being written about in children’s books for the first time. Therefore I think we sometimes make the mistake of thinking these things didn’t happen before,” Klein writes. “In fact, for decades, even centuries, people have been getting divorced, men and women have been realizing that heterosexuality may not be suitable for them, little children and babies have been lying in their cribs exploring their bodies, girls have been getting their periods, boys have been having wet dreams.”
Klein then writes that she’s compelled to offer an alternative to what she calls the “and so she turned to” books—stories in which kids turn to sexual expression as a way of coping with unpleasant stuff that’s going on at home. “All of these books are setting up what to me is a false and even dangerous premise, namely that sexual activity of any kind is only something children ‘turn to’ as a result of a negative experience.” She echoes Blume’s point that she hopes to see more novels where teenagers experiment with sex and don’t lose their way because of it. And not just that; “I would like, most of all, books about young girls discovering, not in the ‘will I get invited to the junior prom?’ sense, what it is to be young and female in this new and sometimes bewildering age of ours.”
Klein and Blume were clearly in lockstep, exchanging ideas as they spent time together; Jennifer Fleissner remembers Judy coming by their apartment back when she was a teenager and playing an REM song for her mother’s famous writer friend. In 1979, when Judy was still living in Santa Fe, Klein wrote her a long letter in which she confessed, good-naturedly, that she was terribly jealous of Forever because she thought it was terrific, and also because she had wanted to be the first author to write so frankly about teen sex. In the same letter, she admitted that she hadn’t liked Wifey and thought Judy had shortchanged Sandy by having her stay with Norman. Fleissner laughed at this and concurred that yes, her mother could be blunt. “It’s funny, she could be very shy with people that she didn’t know. She was definitely not shy in print. I would say she was not at all shy with people she was close to,” she said.
If Klein—who published over thirty novels during the course of her career—felt any friendly competition with Judy, it likely fueled 1977’s It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me, which is her version of Forever. The narrator is Jody Epstein, a rising high school senior who meets green-eyed, unassuming Lyle Alexander over the summer when they’re both working as techs at Sloan Kettering. Unlike Jody, Lyle is new to New York City, having moved from Ohio to live with his sister and brother-in-law after his parents died in a car accident. Where Jody is outgoing, Lyle is quiet and reticent. Their romance blossoms over tennis.
Jody, who is Jewish, recognizes herself as a “type” that’s nonetheless exotic to Midwesterner Lyle. “In New York girls like me are a dime a dozen,” she tells him. When he asks her to elaborate, she flippantly describes herself as “sort of aggressive, but insecure. We’ll all end up being doctors and lawyers and being analyzed for nine million years.” Jody is nothing at all like Krii, except that they both come from complicated homes. Jody’s parents are divorced, and her dad lives in Scarsdale with his new wife and their young children. She lives with her brother, her mother, and her mom’s on-again-off-again boyfriend Elliot, who is still technically married to his ex. The closest thing Jody has to a fond father figure is her mother’s second husband, Philip, a physicist who teaches at Columbia. Philip is who she calls when she needs a nonjudgmental ear.
Like Forever, It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me hits on a range of taboo topics: premarital sex, contraception, rape, and abortion. But Klein’s most innovative spin on the teen romance novel lies in Jody and Lyle’s dynamic—she’s sexually experienced and he isn’t. Because Lyle is a virgin, he takes sex more seriously than she does, at least initially. As Jody tells us, she’s made out with boys before “out of sheer horniness,” and she lost her virginity with her previous boyfriend. But Lyle wants his first time to be special, for both of them. One night, when they’re lying in bed, he admits to Jody that he doesn’t want to have intercourse yet because he doesn’t know if he’s in love with her.
“That’s okay. I’m not sure I’m in love with you,” Jody says.
“That’s what I mean,” Lyle answers.
“I don’t care if you love me or not,” Jody continues.
“You should,” Lyle responds. Then: “It’s your birthright to be loved.”
Jody wonders about this but is understanding with Lyle, especially when he brings up the death of his parents in the context of feeling overwhelmed. The next week in school, Jody’s English Comp teacher asks the students to write stories based on their previous Saturdays, in an effort to get them to tackle real subjects. Jody ends up sharing about her night with Lyle and the teacher reads her story aloud to the class—anonymously, of course. Her classmates argue that the piece is not, in fact, realistic. “First, most of the boys couldn’t believe that there was a boy who wouldn’t sleep with a girl who was willing to sleep with him,” Jody says. “Then, the girls started in and they all latched onto the line about Lyle having said it was my birthright to be loved by someone. They all said they couldn’t understand a girl ‘stooping so low’ as to be willing to sleep with someone she knew didn’t even love her.”
Jody doesn’t take the comments too much to heart; she’s generally pretty confident, and her teacher assures her that she shared the story with the class because she thought it was “poignant.” Having been raised in a sex-positive household, Jody is a direct product of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution. Klein’s novel is a study in what happens when a teenage girl is physically comfortable with herself but more fearful of genuine intimacy. The morning after she and Lyle have sex for the first time, they make breakfast together. “There was just this very peaceful, contented feeling,” Jody explains. “I don’t intend to get married for years, maybe ever, but it was the way you wish being married could be, without people yelling and ending up saying they can’t stand each other.”
Right around her eighteenth birthday, Jody’s father calls to invite her to spend the weekend at his house in Westchester. He tells her she can bring her boyfriend, too. The very idea of introducing Lyle to her semi-estranged father twists her stomach into knots. “To take Lyle along and have him meet Daddy would, for me, be an act of trust that would go beyond practically anything I can think of,” she says. “There’s not a sexual act on earth that would come anywhere close.” Ultimately, she decides to bring him for “moral support” and the trip goes almost exactly how she anticipated it would—her father disappoints her. Less predictable: Lyle gives her her very first penetrative orgasm.
