“I wrote the truth, what I knew to be the truth”: Judy Blume in conversation with Samantha Bee at an event at the 92nd Street Y on June 2, 2015. Accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7svP4zqCc0.
she casually asks Helen to loan her her “sex book”: Judy Blume, Deenie, p. 176.
“I know he was trying to feel me,” she says: Ibid., p. 164.
“This time when he kissed me, I concentrated on kissing him back”: Ibid., p. 183.
“Maybe that’s why my spine started growing crooked!”: Ibid., p. 105.
“It’s very common for girls as well as boys, beginning with adolescence”: Ibid., p. 106.
“Family life education was the first time that American educators”: JZ to RB, May 31, 2022.
“Those were called the ‘Big Four’ ”: Ibid., May 31, 2022.
“Once a young man touched himself in that way”: Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of the Adolescent in the 20th Century (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 8.
“girls who fell prey to self-abuse were clearly aberrant”: Ibid.
“For a long time there has been a certain ritual”: Andrew Hacker, “The Pill and Morality,” New York Times, November 21, 1965.
“If [the teacher] does that at PS3 down in the Village, she’ll be teacher of the year”: JZ to RB, May 31, 2022.
Professor and researcher Michelle Fine was “shocked”: Zoom interview with Michelle Fine, January 6, 2023.
“This was about, ‘you’re a victim, bad things will happen’ ”: Ibid., January 6, 2023.
“I just think people can’t say no if they can’t say yes”: Ibid., January 6, 2023.
“unacknowledged social ambivalence about female sexuality”: Michelle Fine, “Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire,” Harvard Educational Review 58, no. 1 (February 1988): 29–53.
“I still go into classrooms where I’ll say the word ‘masturbation’ ”: Zoom interview with Rachel Lotus, November 8, 2023.
“I don’t think you’ll talk to any sex educator who doesn’t think that Judy Blume”: Ibid., November 8, 2023.
Chapter Ten
Virginity
“Nice girls didn’t go all the way”: Judy Blume, Letters to Judy, p. 211.
She gave Judy book ideas: Lee, Judy Blume’s Story, p. 77.
She thought Tony carried the raincoat to cover his face: Box 115 of the Judy Blume Papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Accessed April 28, 2022.
“In these books, the boys had absolutely no feelings”: Weidt, Presenting Judy Blume, p. 50.
“I set out to teach very few things in my books”: Ibid., p. 51.
“When I was growing up, we had very firm rules”: Judy Blume, Letters to Judy, pp. 210–11.
“years of kissing experience”: Beverly Solochek, “Plotting the Real Teen Scene,” Daily News, September 3, 1976, p. C9.
Blume later elaborated in the Independent: William Leith, “Teen Spirit,” The Independent, July 18, 1999, pp. 11–13. Accessed through the New York Public Library.
“My friends and I played sexual games, sexual games between girlfriends”: Ibid.
“We are exactly the same size”: Judy Blume, Forever (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Bradbury Press, 1975). I worked from the 2014 reprint from Simon & Schuster, p. 13.
“He threatened that if I wouldn’t sleep with him”: Ibid., p. 15.
“Let’s save something for tomorrow”: Ibid., p. 21.
“In the old days girls were divided into two groups”: Ibid., p. 37.
“I’ve been thinking”: Ibid., p. 30.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and have decided I don’t want”: Ibid., p. 184.
“Sybil Davison has a genius IQ”: Ibid., p. 1.
“whole experience was more than she bargained for”: Ibid., p. 184.
“that a girl like Sybil might have a genius IQ”: Weidt, Presenting Judy Blume, p. 50.
“Were you a virgin when you got married?”: Judy Blume, Forever, p. 83.
“Sex is a commitment…”: Ibid., p. 84.
