“This ‘flare-up,’ as the doctors called it”: Judy Blume, Letters to Judy, p. 74.
“I never want to see Boston again”: Lee, Judy Blume’s Story, p. 55.
“The thing that really scares me is I’m not sure I want to be a model”: Judy Blume, Deenie, p. 4.
“Deenie’s the beauty, Helen’s the brain”: Ibid., p. 3.
“Nobody expects much from my schoolwork”: Ibid., p. 43.
“they make your feet spread so your regular shoes don’t fit”: Ibid., p. 5.
“She’s really fussy about what I eat”: Ibid., p. 15.
“Most times I don’t even think about the way I look”: Ibid., p. 14.
“This woman was falling apart”: Weidt, Presenting Judy Blume, p. 103.
“She was very open about her problem”: Judy Blume, Letters to Judy, p. 81.
“I felt like the world’s biggest jerk”: Judy Blume, Deenie, p. 149.
“She’s a nice kid,” Deenie says: Ibid., p. 175.
“I always feel funny when I pass her house”: Ibid., p. 16.
“I wonder if she thinks of herself as a handicapped person”: Ibid., p. 178.
“You’re not telling us Deenie’s going to be deformed”: Ibid., p. 63.
“I expected Daddy to explain everything on the way home”: Ibid., p. 64.
“I had to fight to keep from crying”: Ibid., p. 110.
whose kids are grown up and “has nothing better to do”: Ibid., p. 48.
doing each other’s hair like schoolgirls: Ibid., p. 145.
“I used to tell myself it didn’t matter if I wasn’t pretty”: Ibid., p. 173.
“I wanted better for you,” she tells them: Ibid., p. 174.
“Ma says pigeons are dirty birds with lots of germs”: Ibid., p. 141.
“I looked out the window and no pigeons were on the ledge”: Ibid., p. 152.
Judy was quite proud of them, according to Dick Jackson: Box 115 of the Judy Blume Papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Accessed April 28, 2022.
Chapter Nine
Masturbation
“I rubbed and rubbed until I got that good feeling”: Judy Blume, Deenie (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Bradbury Press, 1973), p. 169.
“I have this special place and when I rub it I get a very nice feeling”: Ibid., pp. 67–68.
“If there were a Professional Masturbators League”: Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (New York: Hachette, 2009), p. 26.
“The first time I slid on my back to the bottom of the tub”: Melissa Febos, Girlhood (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 23.
“Does anyone know the word for stimulating our genitals?”: Judy Blume, Deenie, p. 105.
“The hot water was very relaxing and soon I began to enjoy it”: Ibid., p. 169.
“There’s a whole section on wet dreams and another on masturbation”: Judy Blume, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Bradbury Press, 1970), p. 104.
In 1969, a group of women in their twenties and thirties: Details about the making of Our Bodies, Ourselves come from the documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, released in 2014.
“When the man and woman have been wriggling so hard”: Peter Mayle, Where Did I Come From? (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1973), no page numbers.
“There’s some joy and fun in that book”: Zoom interview with Cory Silverberg, October 26, 2023.
“It is also comfortably frank about the preoccupations of young teen-agers”: Judith Viorst, “Deenie,” New York Times, November 4, 1973.
“Instead of giving Deenie any personality or independent existence”: Kirkus Reviews, September 17, 1973. Accessed via the New York Public Library.
Judy dealt with bad reviews by scribbling: Judy Blume at the Arlington Public Library event on October 22, 2015. Accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUDBcovfFjM.
“I had never heard the word masturbation when I was growing up”: Judy Blume, Letters to Judy, pp. 186–87.
