For books that dropped the moral pretense, you have to look somewhere else, somewhere surprising: Harriet the Spy.
Today, Harriet is probably best known for the cute movie she inspired in 1996, starring future Gossip Girl pot-stirrer Michelle Trachtenberg, or more recently, the hip Apple+ cartoon voiced by Beanie Feldstein. But when Louise Fitzhugh published Harriet the Spy in 1964, she was testing boundaries of what was acceptable in books for kids. Harriet M. Welsch was a girl-detective, but she wasn’t pretty and popular and polite like her predecessor, Nancy Drew. No, Harriet was opinionated and curious to the point of being unpleasant at times. She was bossy with her friends, and single-minded in her desire to unearth people’s secrets. “Harriet the Spy was transgressing all over the place,” said Roger Sutton, who was editor in chief of children’s literature magazine and website the Horn Book from 1996 to 2021. “The adults [in the book] weren’t always right. Sometimes you have to lie. She committed all kinds of felonious deeds that did not go punished.”
Fitzhugh’s next Harriet book took even bigger risks.
In 1965’s The Long Secret, Harriet and her attractive but reserved friend Beth Ellen take their spy games to Southampton, where Harriet’s Manhattan-based family is spending the summer. Harriet and Beth Ellen are on the cusp of adolescence; they daydream about what their lives will look like when they become women. The fingerprints of nascent Second Wave feminism tap across the pages (Fitzhugh herself was a queer feminist intellectual, drinking her way through Greenwich Village). Early in the book, Harriet asks Beth Ellen what she wants to be when she grows up. Shyly, Beth Ellen confesses that she doesn’t “want to be anything at all… I want to marry a rich man. I want to have a little boy, and maybe, a little girl.”
Harriet is disgusted by this answer. “You’ll be a very boring person,” she responds in her signature blunt style. “No one will come and see you. I certainly won’t come and see you. I’ll be working.”
Later in The Long Secret, Beth Ellen is acting grumpy and Harriet screams at her on the phone: “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?”
“I’m—menstruating!” Beth Ellen responds before unceremoniously hanging up.
That weekend, Harriet’s friend from the city, Janie, visits Southampton. No-nonsense Janie wants to be a doctor, or a scientist, which is why she’s comfortable talking about her body’s inner workings to Harriet and Beth Ellen. Janie explains the whole monthly process to the two friends, with Harriet wondering why she hasn’t gotten her period yet. “Now, you know the baby grows inside a woman, in her womb, in her uterus?” Janie asks them. “So, it’s very simple. If you have a baby started in there, the baby lives on the lining; but if you don’t have a baby, like we don’t, then the body very sensibly disposes of the lining that it’s made for the baby.”
Janie’s tutorial lasts a total of six pages and includes medical vocabulary previously unheard of in fiction for children, like fallopian tubes. Fitzhugh and her original publisher, Harper & Row, were bold to include the section, given that referencing female bodily functions in anything but gauzy, euphemistic terms was considered taboo (one popular Victorian-era nickname for the uterus was “mother room”). Indeed, the New York Times review of The Long Secret reverts to whispery language around the subject, even as it celebrates the book’s candor. “The Long Secret, moreover, observes in so many words that being twelvish entails, for a girl, a few more changes than children’s books have hitherto cared to recognize—heaven knows why,” the reviewer writes.
Heaven knows why. That’s what Judy thought, too. Why couldn’t children’s fiction tackle complicated or even controversial subjects?
Her revision of Iggie’s House did enough to convince Jackson and Verrone to sign her. Silsbee said Jackson knew that the finished book still “wasn’t up to what became her standard… but [he] just knew there was something there, and had to publish the book to get to know her.”
Iggie was published in the spring of 1970, and the critics were underwhelmed. Kirkus Reviews, the industry’s book reviewing mainstay, described a hapless yet well-intentioned Winnie—who among many gaffes, introduces her new friends, the Garbers, as being “from Africa,” even though they’ve just moved from Detroit—as “the bumbling, besieged liberal at age eleven.” Ultimately, the reviewer found Winnie’s book-long crusade to garner support for Grove Street’s integration to be “occasionally forced… loose though not slack—in fact evanescent except for the rueful truth.”
Blume has since distanced herself from Iggie’s House. In an afterword to a recent edition of the novel, she says that at the time she wrote it, she “was almost as naive as Winnie is in this book, wanting to make the world a better place but not knowing how.” She explains that she had been moved by the race riots in Newark, which occurred in the summer of 1967, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Iggie’s House is flawed but it was progressive for its time in two ways: it deals with the real discriminatory practices of redlining and blockbusting, and it lets us watch as Winnie slowly calibrates her own moral compass, in a process that’s sometimes painful. When her parents don’t take an immediate stand against racism, she’s deeply disappointed. And when the Garber kids don’t really want to be Winnie’s friend, despite her best intentions, she’s angry and confused.
Jackson saw genuine possibility in the writer behind Iggie’s House. And by the time Bradbury inked the deal to publish it, Judy had already shared some details about a new project that was keeping her busy. “Judy was in my office one day and she said, ‘I’ve written most of another book,’ ” Jackson, who died in 2019, said in Presenting Judy Blume. “ ‘It’s about a young girl who talks to God as if he’s her friend.’ ”
When he read that manuscript, he knew he wasn’t crazy. Many years later, he’d say of the money he and Verrone scraped together to buy the ad that brought in Blume: “It was the best $5,000 we ever spent.”
Chapter Three Pre-Teen Girls
“Always in love”
There’s nothing remarkable about Margaret Simon. She is eleven years old, an only child who has just moved from New York City to the (fictional) suburb of Farbrook, New Jersey. She likes boys, wants to impress her friends, and is impatient to grow her hair longer. She finds adults and their preoccupations a bit funny, like when it’s humid outside, she catches her mother sneakily trying to sniff her own armpits. She is neither shy nor especially outgoing. She’s being raised in a dual-faith household, which in practice means a no-faith household, because the topic of religion is so fraught. As a result, it’s up to her to figure out her own private understanding of God.
All of these details add up to a portrait of a regular adolescent girl. And that’s what makes Margaret Simon special. She isn’t remarkable—but she is real.
Letters to Jackson from 1969 reveal that while Judy was excited about publishing Iggie’s House, the project that had captured her imagination was her as-yet-untitled novel-in-progress. Unlike Iggie, which took a child’s view of a contemporary social issue, “Margaret Simon”—as Blume referred to the draft manuscript—was born from Judy’s own memories. “In Margaret, I decided I’m going to write about what sixth grade was really like for me,” she told the Daily News in 1976. “The personal parts about Margaret were true.”
Judy turned eleven in the winter of 1949, four years after the war ended with a cataclysmic blast on the other side of the world and well into the Truman presidency, when everyone in America was just trying to go back to normal. Well, not exactly normal—the post-war economy was booming. The middle class had gotten a buff and a polish. Families of four or even five could thrive on one income, which meant kids were liberated from hovering psychic burdens like work and the draft and could concentrate on being children for a little bit longer than previous generations. That’s how the adolescent, focused on school and socializing, was born.
As a child, Judy was daddy’s little girl. Her parents, Rudolph and Essie, both grew up in Elizabeth and met when they were finishing high school. They married young, him dark-haired and dapper, her slender, serious, and blond. They stayed in town, where they had lots of family living nearby. Essie, an introvert who loved books, was a guarded person, keeping her feelings under wraps. Rudolph, on the other hand, was dynamic—he was funny and charming. He owned his own dental practice and was widely admired within the community. Judy thought of him as a natural philosopher who just happened to fix teeth for a living.
Her father was her go-to parent for comfort and affection, the one who indulged her in round after round of hide-and-seek, took her temperature when she was sick, and soothed her during thunderstorms (one boom was enough to send her leaping across the room). She rewarded him with a special nickname: Doey-Bird. Every night before bed, she gave him his “treatment,” which was a series of kisses and hugs, always doled out in the same pattern. Blume described it in her 1977 autobiographical novel, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, as “a sliding kiss, three quick hugs… finished with a butterfly kiss on his nose.”
The Sussmans were Jewish, so Margaret’s struggle with religion—in which she seeks out both Jewish and Christian experiences as part of a yearlong project to clarify her faith—wasn’t Judy’s. But when it came to Margaret’s secret, intimate relationship with God, that was all her. From the first page of the book, Margaret whispers a prayer, as if conjuring an imaginary friend.
“Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret,” she begins, as she does with every quiet appeal to God throughout the novel. “We’re moving today. I’m so scared God… Don’t let New Jersey be too horrible. Thank you.”
Judy spoke to God, too, mostly as a way of coping with her anxiety about her father’s mortality. He was ostensibly healthy, but much of her childhood was shaped by illness and death. Not just the Holocaust, though whispers about the camps made her shudder. With many generations of family around, there were inevitably a lot of funerals, followed by intense, seven-day shivahs. She was terrified Rudolph was going to die young—at the age of forty-two, to be exact. He was the youngest of seven children and two of his older brothers, also dentists, had unexpectedly passed away at that age. Please, she prayed to whoever might be listening, not Doey, too. Sally has the same fear in Sally J. Freedman: “Let Doey-Bird get through this bad year… this year of being forty-two… we need him God… we love him,” Sally begs in her bed at night. “You wouldn’t let three brothers die at the same age, would you? But somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered hearing that bad things always happen in threes.”
Her fear of something happening to Doey was so overwhelming that Judy became compulsive. “I made bargains with God,” Blume wrote in her 1986 collection of children’s letters, Letters to Judy: What Kids Wish They Could Tell You. “I became ritualistic, inventing prayers that had to be repeated seven times a day, in order to keep my father safe and healthy.”
She also felt like she needed to keep her worries to herself. Her brother, David, was the problem child, so she felt pressure to be perfect, fulfilling Rudolph and Essie’s expectations for both of them. From a young age, David was brilliant but inscrutable. He was rebellious—once, he got sent home from kindergarten after kicking his teacher in the stomach. When Judy was going into third grade, David developed a kidney infection so persistent that Essie moved the three of them south to Miami for the year, hoping the sea air would cure him. It worked, but it also meant that Judy only saw her beloved father on holidays, when he could get away from the office and fly down.
More and more she learned to hide things from her family. Essie needed her to be easy, talented, popular, happy—and so Judy learned to give her just that.
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.
