It wasn’t just Essie. American culture in the 1950s told adolescent girls that they should be pretty, popular, and happy, too. If America was a cake, that demographic was the icing, eye-catching and frothy. Teenagers, and particularly teenage girls, embodied frivolity and leisure. They were there to show the world just how far the United States had come.

In December 1944, Life magazine published a pictorial called “Teen-Age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of Their Own,” featuring a handful of girls ages fifteen to seventeen, who were growing up in Webster Groves, Missouri. It described these coiffed, carefree creatures as “a lovely, gay, blissful society almost untouched by war.” Their clothing choices (skirts and sweaters or loose-fitting blue jeans with button-downs), slang (“seein’ ya” for goodbye and “uh-huh” for yes), and preferred pastimes (hanging out at record stores and hosting cheerful all-girl “hen parties”) were presented with the kind of amused fascination usually reserved for toddlers and zoo animals.

“It is a world of many laws,” Life explained. “They are capricious, changing or reversing themselves almost overnight. But while they are in effect, the laws are immutable and the punishment for violation is ostracism, swift and terrifying practice of ancient people.”

In her new book, Judy recorded those laws. She didn’t bring in an adult perspective to subtly swipe at them; rather, she took them as seriously as any other rite of passage.

Margaret starts to adjust to her new town when she meets her neighbor Nancy Wheeler, a chatty eleven-year-old with a turned-up nose and more than her share of bravado. Practically the first thing Nancy tells Margaret is that she can’t show up to school wearing socks. “Loafers, but no socks,” Nancy says solemnly. “Otherwise, you’ll look like a baby.” Margaret takes her at her word, despite her mother’s protestations that she’ll get blisters. “Well then, I’ll just have to suffer,” Margaret tells her, and she isn’t wrong. The Life article outlines similar sartorial protocols, ephemeral but also somehow ironclad. “Months ago colored bobby socks folded at the top were decreed, not by anyone or any group but, as usual, by a sudden and universal acceptance of the new idea. Now, no teen-ager dares wear anything but pure white socks without a fold.”

Having dutifully shown up to the first day of school sockless, Margaret scores an invite to Nancy’s secret club, which she conducts with her two closest friends, Janie Loomis and Gretchen Potter. Together, the foursome form the Pre-Teen Sensations, or PTS’s, a group where everyone answers to new, exotic names (Alexandra, Veronica, Kimberly, and Mavis), wears bras, and keeps Boy Books, in which they record their weekly list of crushes. These details came straight from Judy’s own adolescence. In sixth grade, she also belonged to a club, called the Pre-Teen Kittens, with her best friends (an early draft of Are You There God? actually uses this name, with the members adopting feline identities like Tabby and Fluffy). The girls met up after school and, just like Margaret and her peers, unabashedly gossiped about boys and bodies.

Both groups—the fictional PTS’s and the real PTK’s—were obsessed with their slow-to-grow bustlines. “We must—we must—we must increase our bust!” the girls chant in Are You There God? immortalizing the same routine Judy used to do with her friends. She has demonstrated it in interviews and has talked about correcting the young actresses’ form on the set of the 2023 Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret movie. Here’s how it goes: you raise both arms to shoulder height and bend your elbows at right angles, then swing them back and forth rhythmically. “But it doesn’t work,” Blume joked in a 2013 interview with HuffPost Live, gesturing to her flat chest.

To Judy, it seemed weird that no one had ever thought to set down these kinds of details in a book for kids before. As far as she was concerned, bras and boy books were just a normal part of growing up. Not every kid had a horse, like Velvet Brown in 1935’s National Velvet, but every girl had a body. She made Margaret boy crazy, the way she was in her junior high years.

Over the course of the novel, Margaret maintains a private crush on fourteen-year-old Moose Freed, who she meets through Nancy’s older brother. Moose starts cutting the Simon family’s lawn on Saturday mornings, after Margaret’s father—a lifelong city dweller—nearly slices off his hand with the power mower. Margaret pines for Moose from the window while he works. “I pretended to be really busy reading a book, but the truth is—I was watching Moose… Moose would be number one in my Boy Book if only I was brave enough, but what would Nancy think? She hated him.”

Instead, Margaret, as Mavis, picks the much less controversial Philip Leroy to top off her list of crushes. Philip is the safe choice—the cute guy in her class who everyone likes. But one afternoon before a school dance, Margaret admits to God that she, too, has been sucked into Philip’s pre-teen gravitational pull: “It’s not so much that I like him as a person, God, but as a boy he’s very handsome. And I’d love to dance with him.” Later that night, Margaret gets her wish, though the reality is considerably less transporting than she’d hoped. Philip is a clumsy dancer who steps on her toes and Nancy, standing right next to them in the school gym, almost starts crying because she’s so jealous.

Margaret has her first kiss with Philip Leroy, at a party during a game of Two Minutes in the Closet. There, in the dark and between her nervous giggles, he gives her a quick peck on the lips. “A really fast kiss! Not the kind you see in the movies where the boy and girl cling together for a long time,” Margaret says. Even still, she’s pretty sure she liked it.

For Judy, channeling those awkward, early crushes came easily. As a kid, she was “always in love,” she told the UK Independent in 1999 while promoting her adult novel Summer Sisters. By age fourteen, just a few years older than Margaret, she said she was regularly going to “make-out parties… you invited a group of boys and girls, and you turned out the lights, and you played.”

Writing Are You There God?, Judy could convincingly borrow from those experiences in part because they still spoke to her, calling out from the depths of her memory. Compared to her committed, responsible twenties, her teenage years felt ecstatic and full of life. “When you’re that age, everything is still there in front of you,” Blume has said of her adolescence. “You have the opportunity to be almost anyone you want. I was not yet thirty when I started the book, but I felt my options were already gone.”

Judy had discovered that working on a novel—from the early stage, of making up the characters, to the final phases, of polishing it with Jackson—offered her a welcome reassurance: life could still surprise her. As she chipped away at Are You There God?, she found herself diligently taking notes on a yellow pad as new ideas and themes surfaced, working out Margaret’s unique relationship with God, for instance, and how the young character felt about her pubescent body. Margaret was quite a bit easier to evoke than Winnie. Maybe it’s because in Judy’s best moments of writing, Margaret was emerging, all but fully formed, from somewhere deep inside her own consciousness.

And Jackson was shaping up to be the ideal literary midwife. By the time Judy was ready to share her draft of the novel—which she plunked out on her typewriter in a wildly creative six-week burst, in between cooking, cleaning, and playing rounds of golf—she and Jackson had already established their routines. Judy would come by the Bradbury Press office, where she’d ask him to open his windows to let in some air. Then they’d sit down at his desk and talk for hours at a clip. They’d lay out the printed manuscript between them and flip through the pages, one by one. Jackson, who would have already discussed the draft with Verrone, came armed with their combined thoughts and his pencil. As he and Judy chatted, he’d scribble and erase. By the time they finished, Judy would leave with her marked-up novel, the margins filled with Jackson’s handwritten notes.

With Are You There God?, one of Jackson’s biggest concerns had to do with Margaret’s new best friend, Nancy.

In one of the book’s most emotional moments, Nancy sends Margaret a postcard from Washington, DC, with just three words: “I GOT IT!!!” Margaret rightly understands this to mean Nancy’s first period: a milestone that’s taken a competitive turn for the PTS’s. Margaret, feeling left behind, is devastated. “I ripped the card into tiny shreds and ran to my room,” she says in the book. “There was something wrong with me. I just knew it. I flopped onto my bed and cried.” Here, Jackson didn’t worry about the subject matter. Instead, he wondered—is Nancy telling the truth? Judy, who had been preoccupied with Margaret’s internal experience, hadn’t even considered it. But sure enough, when she thought it over, she realized that yes, Nancy was lying.

In the final draft of the novel, Margaret finds out Nancy lied when she spends the day in New York City with the Wheeler family. Nancy gets her first period in the bathroom of a steak house after a trip to Radio City, and—caught with her pants down, literally—begs Margaret not to expose her to the other girls.

While Judy, like any author, needed guidance when it came to building plot and character, her style—especially when writing in the first person—was always top-notch, as Jackson told School Library Journal in 2001. “It was the voice, the absence of adult regret, instruction or nostalgia,” Jackson said, that always convinced him that Blume’s books were a little bit magical. “She turns them over to the kids, to the characters,” he continued.

And for Jackson, a children’s book’s greatest strength was always that rare whiff of authenticity baked into the pages. Jackson was dyslexic, which Silsbee said gave him a surprising advantage when it came to sniffing it out. “He told me, ‘This is the reason I got into doing children’s books, because I read at the same pace that children read.’ So when he read a sentence, it was like this unfolding adventure… He said, ‘That’s why I think I’m a good children’s book editor. Because I’m forced to slow down.’ ”

Chapter Four Menstruation

“Someday, it will happen to you.”

By the fall of 1970, when Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was published, sex had busted out of the bedroom.

A Time magazine cover from July 11, 1969, with the cover line “The Sex Explosion,” showed a nude man and woman about to embrace, shrouded only by a half-unzipped fig leaf. The models were members of the New York cast of the play Oh! Calcutta!, a surprise hit that had recently opened in an old burlesque theater where the actors performed almost entirely naked, portraying erotic acts from masturbation to group sex. The show, which got terrible reviews, was nonetheless packed night after night and commanded record ticket prices.

Are You There God? emerged into a rip-roaring, in-your-face culture. Girls still formed secret clubs, but they conducted them while songs like “American Woman” by the Guess Who—a guttural anti-Vietnam anthem—and “Lola” by the Kinks—about a guy boogying the night away with a drag queen or a trans woman—thrummed in the background. Hair was on Broadway; the hippies barely wore clothes! The Summer of Love was in the rearview, as was Woodstock.

Sure, Are You There God?—which took its iconic name from a typist, who used the novel’s first line as a placeholder—had its boundary-pushing moments, like when Margaret admitted to sneaking peeks at her dad’s copies of Playboy, or when she stuffed her training bra with cotton balls and admired how she looked in the mirror. But 1970 was an entirely different world than the one Judy grew up in.

Or so she and Jackson thought.

The critics mostly liked Blume’s slim coming-of-age novel. Kirkus gave Are You There God? a mixed review, calling it “fresh” and complimenting Blume’s “easy way with words.” However, the reviewer thought Margaret’s obsession with her body was immature, and considered whether the book sent the right message, given that she doesn’t gain perspective and grow out of it by the end. “The effect is to confirm common anxieties, rather than allaying them,” Kirkus wrote, wondering if the story was perhaps intended as “satirical.” As the reviewer noted with more than a shadow of judgment, the novel closed with Margaret getting her first period.

On the other hand, the New York Times described it as a “funny, warm and loving book, one that captures the essence of beginning adolescence.” That same day, the Times included Are You There God? in a write-up of the year’s outstanding children’s books. Judy was overjoyed when she saw the paper. “That was the first time I felt ‘I can really do this,’ ” she said in Judy Blume’s Story. “These people are taking me seriously! It’s not just pretend.”

Her name was getting out there. She gained a frisson of notoriety in her town. She gifted three copies of Are You There God? to Randy and Larry’s elementary school, but as she’d later tell it, the principal refused to put it in the library. He said that menstruation wasn’t an appropriate topic for kids that age.

Then, there was the time the Blumes’ phone rang and Judy picked up. The person on the other end of the line—a woman—asked her if she was the one who wrote the novel.

“Yes,” Judy said.

“Communist!” the voice shrieked, before quickly hanging up.

How bizarre. It was a strange thing to call someone who’d simply written a book about an American middle schooler and her friend group. Wasn’t it?

These days, the Right uses a specific set of inflammatory words when it’s accusing someone of exposing children to inappropriate material: “Indoctrination.” “Pedophilia.” “Grooming.” “When I was 17 I discovered one of my younger siblings had been reading Judy Blume drivel at a friend’s house,” a Twitter user posted to their 18,000+ followers on April 16, 2023. “Their behavior became unacceptable. Judy Blume is a groomer.” But in the Vietnam War era of the early 1970s, the shorthand for anything subversive was “communist.” To a certain buttoned-up demographic, Communism was an encroaching political movement that had infected the minds of the American left wing. Loud and freewheeling rock music? Communist. Roll your eyes all you want, but it’s true.

Widespread sex education? Definitely communist. Sex education in schools had been around for over half a century, but it was still an ideological battleground. It first cropped up in the 1910s when soldiers started coming home from the front lines of World War I. Many returned with unwanted reunion gifts for their wives, girlfriends, and sexual partners: gonorrhea and syphilis. The spread of venereal disease (as it was termed back then) was so swift and urgent that new, government-backed organizations popped up to deal with it. Billionaire oil-man John D. Rockefeller was a big supporter of sex ed in schools and he funneled money into the cause.

The thinking went that adults were already too far gone when it came to safe sex practices, but children and teens could be taught better habits. If the next generation received the right training, they’d be less vulnerable to disease and unwanted pregnancies. That said, institutional sex ed was controversial from the start. Over the years, detractors argued that devoting classroom time to sex and reproduction contributed to an overly permissive culture. They felt that schools had no right to butt into a conversation that had traditionally been entrusted to close adults at home.

The debate continued into the mid-century and through the sexual revolution, with pro–sex ed activists arguing it had a distinctly moral purpose. The landscape was changing, sex educators argued, and kids needed updated maps to navigate it. Teens who understood their bodies were bound to be more responsible with them. Appropriate sex education could escort young adults down the path toward married, monogamous sex.

Spearheading this conversation was SIECUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, established in 1964. Its founder was Dr. Mary Steichen Calderone, who grew up in the bohemian West Village as the daughter of the famed photographer Edward Steichen. She graduated from Vassar, went to medical school, and then became medical director at Planned Parenthood in 1953. But ten years later, she was ready to strike out on her own. In her work for the organization, she had started to suspect that Planned Parenthood was “looking at the problem [of unwanted pregnancy] from the wrong end of the telescope,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, author of Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education. “The problem wasn’t the availability of contraceptives, although that remains a problem. The problem was Americans’ ideas about sex itself.”

Calderone started SIECUS with a few colleagues in her hometown of New York City after determining that young adults needed a clearer understanding of how sex worked and its place in society in general. For Calderone, who was considered a firebrand in her day, sex wasn’t something to be ashamed of—but it wasn’t something to be glib about, either. She believed intercourse belonged in the marital bed, between a man and a woman. “Mary Calderone, despite what her enemies said, was no flame-throwing radical,” Zimmerman said, citing the nickname her right-wing critics gave her: Mary Stinkin’ Calderone. “She too thought that in the best case scenario, sex happened in what she called a long term, committed relationship… [She] didn’t have a lot of time for gay sex. [She] was concerned about what she saw as the cheapening of sex that attached to the sexual revolution. But at the same time, she wanted a much more open and explicit discussion of the subject.”

That involved advocating for frank sex education in public schools and in 1968 consulting on How Babies Are Made, a primer for children released by Time-Life Books. One of the first volumes of its kind, the no-fuss hardcover picture book—which has vintage, paper-cut color illustrations on every page—walks young readers through the cycle of reproduction, first using the example of flowers, then chickens, then dogs, and eventually, human beings. This approach followed the then-standard model of sex education, where the sperm and the egg were contextualized within the larger biological framework of plants in nature: literally, the birds and the bees. “The plants and animals stuff was a way to try to teach this stuff without making kids interested in it,” Zimmerman said. “Because the goal is to prevent [sex]. It’s not learn by doing, it’s to prevent the doing.”

How Babies Are Made works its way up to a man and a woman embracing in bed and describes intercourse in clear but clinical language. “The sperm, which come from the father’s testicles, are sent into the mother through his penis. To do this, the father and mother lie down facing each other and the father places his penis in the mother’s vagina.” The obvious message is that it’s all in service of perpetuating human life, by way of a process that’s as natural as dusty yellow pollen fertilizing a blooming flower. However, there is a major difference, the book attests: “Unlike plants and animals, when human mothers and fathers create a new baby, they are sharing a very personal and special relationship.”

But even this was too much for the critics of sex ed. The same year that How Babies Are Made was published, a former professor and religious zealot named Gordon V. Drake started churning out articles for Christian publications denouncing liberal sex ed as, yes, Communism. SIECUS, hand in hand with the National Education Association, were trying to “destroy the traditional moral fiber of America and replace it with a pervasive sickly humanism,” Drake wrote in a forty-page screed called Is the Schoolhouse the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? He didn’t approve of How Babies Are Made because it made no mention of marriage. Calling the people at SIECUS a bunch of “Johnny-come-lately pornographers,” Drake attempted to tease out their various communist sympathies. He criticized their mission to get sex ed into more public school classrooms as evidence of a campaign to force religion and morality out of American life. “This, obviously drives a wedge between the family, church and school,” he wrote. “If this is accomplished, and the new morality is affirmed, our children will become easy targets for Marxism and other amoral, nihilistic philosophies—as well as V.D.!”

Clearly, Judy disagreed. She eagerly picked up a copy of How Babies Are Made for Randy and Larry. She was determined to be honest with them about sex, partly because her own parents had made things so awkward. Her first introduction to menstruation came at the age of nine, when her family drove out to Long Island to visit her aunt, uncles, and cousins for the day. Her teenage cousin Grace wasn’t feeling well and young Judy sensed it wasn’t a run-of-the-mill cold keeping her down. As Blume recalls in her book Letters to Judy, she spent the whole car ride home asking about Grace, only to get stonewalled. “You’ll find out when you’re thirteen” was all her father would say.

But Judy was persistent and when she brought it up again at home, her father pulled her onto his lap and gave her the “talk”—which in this case was a vague, “confusing” story about eggs and the moon. “There was something about eggs dropping down, something about blood and something about the lunar cycle, leading me to believe that every time the moon was full, every female in the world over the age of thirteen was menstruating,” Blume recalled.

Nobody gave her a special picture book to describe the inevitable physical changes that would come with puberty. Her mother wasn’t much help, either. A year later, Judy watched Essie buy a menstrual pad in a public bathroom. When she asked what it was for, the mother-daughter pair had a clipped conversation that ended abruptly with Essie telling her, “Someday, it will happen to you.”

Ten-year-old Judy nodded. “But I still didn’t understand exactly what would happen or why.”

When she finally did learn more about periods, she became desperate to get hers, especially after her friends started menstruating. In her mind it meant they were leaving her behind. “I wanted my period so badly,” Blume said in Judy Blume’s Story, “that I once put a pin in my finger to draw blood. I smeared it on a pad and wore the pad just to see what it would feel like.”

She channeled that yearning when she was writing about Margaret. Unlike The Long Secret, Are You There God? doesn’t spend time expounding on the physical mechanics of periods—there are no mentions of eggs or moons, let alone fallopian tubes. Instead, it treats menarche like a rite of passage so earth-shattering that schoolgirls are compelled to pray, cry, and lie about it. Margaret sees getting her period as an initiation into a new, grown-up world, marked by the trappings of female adulthood: bras, menstrual belts, and sanitary pads. In anticipation of the big event, she and her friend Janie slip into a drugstore to check out the personal care aisle. Perusing the selection, the girls settle on the brand they’d like to eventually use: Teenage Softies. They feel like rebels making the purchase, given that neither kid actually needs them yet. “Today I was feeling brave,” Margaret narrates. “I thought, so what if God’s mad at me? Who cares?”

When she gets home, Margaret tries on a pad in the privacy of her closet (early editions of the book have her using a menstrual belt, while subsequent printings are updated to reflect the advent of sticky tape, in a change originally suggested by Blume’s British editor). “I wanted to find out how it would feel,” she says, pulling her pants up. “Now I knew. I liked it.”