“One thing I’m sure of is I don’t want to spend my life cleaning some house like Ma.”

Judy’s illnesses didn’t start with her marriage. She had always been a delicate kid. In seventh grade, she had a massive outbreak of eczema, worsened by an allergy to the ointment a doctor prescribed to soothe it. “This ‘flare-up,’ as the doctors called it, caused a disfiguring rash that covered my whole body,” Blume wrote in Letters to Judy. “My face swelled and my eyes shut… I felt very sorry for myself.”

She got sick with mono her first semester in college and had to come home from Boston University to recuperate in New Jersey. She spent a month weak and glassy-eyed in bed, staring at the walls, and by the time she felt better, she was so embarrassed that she decided to transfer to NYU. “I never want to see Boston again,” she informed Rudolph and Essie. She needed a fresh start, somewhere she wouldn’t be the sickly girl who vanished after orientation.

Her body had been uncooperative throughout much of her teens and twenties. Although there hadn’t been long-lasting repercussions of her various ailments, she could easily imagine what that might feel like for a junior high student.

Deenie is the story of a thirteen-year-old aspiring model who gets diagnosed with scoliosis and has to wear a bulky back brace. But scratch the surface and you’ll see that Blume’s 1973 novel is also a story about mothers and daughters.

Ellie Newman’s journey is about slow but steady self-actualization. Thelma Fenner’s story is a cautionary tale. In movement terms, Thelma, Deenie’s mom, is melting in the crucible of the feminine mystique, but she doesn’t know it. She’s bored, unfulfilled, childlike. And all it takes is one family crisis, centered on the battleground of her adolescent daughter Deenie’s changing body, to blow the lid off and expose her.

The book opens with tension between Thelma and Deenie. The pair, who live in Elizabeth, New Jersey, with Deenie’s father, Frank, and older sister, Helen, are headed into Manhattan to see a modeling agent. Deenie is beautiful, and Thelma wants her to capitalize on it. “The thing that really scares me is I’m not sure I want to be a model,” Deenie admits to the reader, while curled up on a bus on the New Jersey Turnpike. She’d rather join the school cheerleading squad than get a job, even a potentially glamorous one that will help her “make a lot of money and maybe get discovered for the movies, too,” according to her mother.

Yet Deenie is painfully aware of her role in the family. “Deenie’s the beauty, Helen’s the brain,” Thelma tells anyone who’s willing to listen, including their bus driver. By categorizing her daughters this way, Thelma invests in them differently. With Helen, she’s rigorous about her homework, making sure nothing distracts her from her academic promise. Meanwhile, Deenie’s grades are tossed off as irrelevant. “Nobody expects much from my schoolwork so I get by with hardly ever cracking a book as long as I don’t bring home any D’s or F’s,” Deenie says.

Instead, Thelma rides Deenie about more superficial things. Deenie, for instance, is not allowed to wear sneakers, because “they make your feet spread so your regular shoes don’t fit anymore.” Deenie’s also aware that her eating habits are policed in a way that her sister’s are not. “She’s really fussy about what I eat,” she says of Thelma. “She leaves Helen alone but watches me like a hawk. She thinks if she’s in charge of my diet I’ll never get pimples or oily hair. I hope she’s right.”

At the start of the book, Deenie is well aware of the discrepancies between how she and her sister are treated, but it’s clear she doesn’t quite know what to do about it. She isn’t sure if she wants to be a model—but like any self-conscious adolescent girl with a middle school crush and an overbearing mom, she doesn’t want acne and greasy hair, either. Her looks, she tells us before her highly anticipated cheerleading tryout, don’t occupy her thoughts all that often, although she’s conscious of being pretty and the advantages that come with it. “Most times I don’t even think about the way I look but on special occasions, like today, being good-looking really comes in handy,” she says.

Yet the audition doesn’t go the way Deenie had hoped. She doesn’t make the squad, and the next day, her gym teacher asks her to swing by so she can take a closer look at Deenie’s posture. Soon, she’s off to see a specialist about her uneven hips and rounded shoulders. The would-be model gets diagnosed with idiopathic scoliosis, a condition that arises most often in pre-teen girls, where their spines start to grow in a curved shape. The doctor says she’ll need to have an operation or get fitted for a cumbersome back brace. With that, Deenie leaves the fold of her mother’s expectations and enters the world of disability.

Blume has said that she got the idea for Deenie after a real-life encounter in 1970. One night, she met a woman at a party whose fourteen-year-old daughter was recently diagnosed with scoliosis, and she had to wear a back brace to correct it. “This woman was falling apart,” Blume says in Presenting Judy Blume. Judy then met the daughter and was impressed by her poise and resilience, casting a completely different light than her stressed-out mom. “She was very open about her problem and shared some of her feelings and experiences with me,” Blume later wrote about her.

She researched scoliosis and visited a hospital where she observed kids getting fitted for their Milwaukee braces: the restrictive, full-torso support garment that Deenie has to wear. Judy recalled her struggle with eczema and decided to write that into her new book, too. She created a character named Barbara Curtis, the new girl in Deenie’s class who becomes a mirror for Deenie’s eventual self-acceptance. Barbara, like the real-life Judy, has a rash all over her body, which at first Deenie finds “disgusting.” Secretly, Deenie nicknames her the Creeping Crud, and prays she won’t get partnered with her in gym class.

But after Deenie starts wearing the brace to school, she looks at Barbara Curtis differently. Barbara is kind to her during her awkward adjustment period with the medical device, helping Deenie tie her shoes when she can’t figure out how to bend down and reach them. “I felt like the world’s biggest jerk,” Deenie admits to the reader at that moment. Later, she introduces Barbara to her friends. “She’s a nice kid,” Deenie says. “I think I must have been really weird to not like her just because of her creeping crud.”

For Deenie, opening her mind to the experiences of disabled people within her community allows her to make peace with her new reality, which is that she’ll have to wear the Milwaukee brace for four long years. No matter how she tries to camouflage it, the device—which she needs to keep on almost twenty-four hours a day in order to reroute the growth of her spine—pokes up past the base of her neck and shows through her clothes. Her appearance, which has defined her at home for much of her life, is being compromised. But Deenie is surprisingly spunky. After years of avoiding eye contact with “Old Lady Murray,” the hunchbacked woman who sells magazines on the street corner, Deenie tries talking to her. Old Lady Murray isn’t terribly interested in conversation and it doesn’t go well. But Deenie is facing up to the fact that she and the “crazy” town peddler now have something in common: kyphosis, or a rounded upper back.

Deenie’s diagnosis also encourages her to reconsider Gena Courtney, a neighbor and schoolmate who was hit by a delivery truck when she was in first grade. The accident cost Gena her eyesight in one eye and she has to wear braces on both legs. Early in the novel, Deenie admits that she’s never known how to treat Gena since then. “I always feel funny when I pass her house—like I should stop and say hello—but then I think I better not, because I wouldn’t know how to act or anything,” she says. By the end of book, Deenie sees her through fresh eyes, too. “I wonder if she thinks of herself as a handicapped person or just a regular girl, like me,” Deenie thinks.

After getting used to her back brace, Deenie’s ability to still see herself as a regular girl has to do with her baseline temperament—her admirable pluck—and the kindness of her friends at school, who, after getting their questions out of the way, treat her exactly the same. Even Buddy Brader, the boy she’s been flirting with, is still interested in Deenie. Just before their second kiss, at a party in her friend’s basement, Buddy asks if she can remove the brace. Deenie, despite having packed a change of clothes for just that reason, holds her ground in the moment. “I have to wear it all the time,” she tells him.

“Oh well,” Buddy says, all but unaffected.

These flashes of acceptance buoy Deenie, who begins to trust that scoliosis won’t ruin her life. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Thelma.

Thelma is devastated by Deenie’s diagnosis. If part of a parent’s job is modeling strength for one’s children, she fails at this almost immediately. To be fair, neither Deenie’s mother nor her father reacts well to the news that she has scoliosis that requires aggressive intervention. “You’re not telling us Deenie’s going to be deformed, are you?” Frank asks the doctor who identifies Deenie’s condition. Meanwhile, Thelma panics. “Ma started whispering, ‘Oh my God,’ over and over again,” Deenie says.

On the drive home from the doctor’s office, the adult Fenners bicker about which side of the family Deenie inherited her scoliosis from. They’re not at all attuned to their daughter, who herself is emotionally free-falling in the backseat of the car. “I expected Daddy to explain everything on the way home… Instead, he and Ma argued about whose fault it was that I have something wrong with my spine until we pulled into our driveway. It was almost as if they’d forgotten I was there.”

But in the weeks that follow, Frank adjusts to the family’s new normal while Thelma continues to spin. In her eyes, Deenie’s brace clutters up her tidy organization of their family. How can Deenie be the beauty if she’s confined to an ugly piece of medical equipment for the next four years—a period of time she views as critical to Deenie’s burgeoning modeling career? That’s why Thelma treats the brace like a misfortune that’s happening to all of them. “I had to fight to keep from crying,” Deenie says when she first sees it. Meanwhile, Thelma holds nothing back. “Just when I thought I was going to be okay Ma started. ‘Oh my God,’ she cried. ‘What did we ever do to deserve this?’ ” She blames Deenie for slouching, despite the fact that the professionals are clear with the family that idiopathic scoliosis is an inherited disease.

The problem, Blume seems to be telling us, isn’t just that Thelma’s insensitive—she’s immature. The feminine mystique has left her ill-equipped and puerile. She can’t even drive: a symbol of her dependency. Frank has to act as her chauffeur, or she hitches rides with Aunt Rae, her best friend whose kids are grown up and “has nothing better to do” than to cart Thelma around. Aunt Rae—who is not actually related to the Fenners—is almost as invested in Deenie’s modeling as Thelma is. At one point in the book, Deenie comes home and finds Thelma and Aunt Rae doing each other’s hair like schoolgirls.

By the age of thirteen, Deenie is positive about one thing: she wants more. “She spends hours and hours cleaning the place,” Deenie says of Thelma’s role as a homemaker. “One thing I’m sure of is I don’t want to spend my life cleaning some house like Ma.” Deenie confesses that sometimes she’s jealous of Helen’s brain because it means that she’ll grow up to have the kind of demanding job that keeps her too busy for things like washing the floors until you could eat off them, like her mother does. Modeling isn’t a sure thing, nor does it seem like the kind of skill that guarantees lifelong independence, Deenie muses. Toward the end of the novel, she thinks to herself that she might like to become an orthopedist.

The crisis ends up freeing Deenie, loosening her from the grips of a controlling mother. And while Thelma doesn’t quite see it that way, she’s also forced to admit that she’s been living out her own dreams through her girls. Helen and Deenie are hard on her near the close of the book, when it comes out that bookish Helen has been skipping her study dates to go hang out with her secret boyfriend. Helen, it turns out, doesn’t like being labeled, either. “I used to tell myself it didn’t matter if I wasn’t pretty like Deenie because I have a special brain and Deenie’s just ordinary,” Helen sobs. “But that didn’t help, Ma… because it’s not true!”

Thelma doesn’t apologize. She gets defensive. But her defense is revealing of the ways her own regrets have guided her parenting. Her last line in the book serves to let her daughters know exactly why she’s been so meddlesome. “I wanted better for you,” she tells them as Helen and Deenie cry together. “Better than what I had for myself. That’s what I always planned for my girls… is that so wrong?”

“I think of the story as one about parental expectations,” Blume writes in the afterword to the twenty-first-century paperback edition of Deenie. “What happens when a parent pigeonholes their children?” Judy took this question of pigeonholing seriously; Helen and Deenie are birds learning to flee the nest, figuring out who they’ll be when they land. Pigeons even figure into Deenie’s personal journey. The first day she wears the brace to school, the vice principal calls Deenie into her office to tell her that due to her diagnosis, she’s now eligible to ride “the special bus,” which is free. Instantly, Deenie rejects this idea—riding the bus with kids like Gena Courtney would reaffirm that she’s different—and she glances out the window, trying to hide her tears. On the ledge, she sees a pigeon and thinks, “Ma says pigeons are dirty birds with lots of germs and I should stay away from them.” The vice principal gives her a form and tells her to bring it home for her parents to sign.

Deenie conveniently loses the form and two weeks later, the vice principal checks in about it. By then, Deenie’s bad attitude about wearing the brace has lifted. She’s not pleased about it, but she’s willing to withstand it as a temporary burden. “I looked out the window and no pigeons were on the ledge,” Deenie says, nodding to her ability to rise above her mother’s fears and biases.

The pigeons are brief visitors in the manuscript, but Judy was quite proud of them, according to Dick Jackson. Their work together on the book focused on Deenie’s growth away from Thelma, as expressed through her relationship with her two best friends. An early draft of the novel established that Deenie was adopted, which served to distance her from Thelma as Deenie’s biological destiny started to unfurl. But Jackson wasn’t convinced this was the right way to do it. Instead, he and Judy talked it through and decided that Janet and Midge—Deenie’s closest schoolmates—could help to more robustly reflect Deenie’s maturation. Blume then built moments into the novel, including the trio shopping for a nightgown and going to the movies together, that illuminated all the stops on Deenie’s path.

As always, Blume and Jackson were in lockstep when it came to their editorial vision for the project. And interestingly, one aspect of Deenie—by far the book’s most controversial plotline—they barely touched at all.

Chapter Nine Masturbation

“I rubbed and rubbed until I got that good feeling.”

Like many adolescents, Deenie has a secret.

Or maybe “secret” isn’t the right word. Deenie has a private ritual, something she does when she can’t sleep. She doesn’t know why, but it makes her feel better. Touching her “special place” helps stave off her worries. Or, as she puts it, “I have this special place and when I rub it I get a very nice feeling.”

Let’s be clear—until Deenie, girls didn’t masturbate in children’s literature. Inventive, now classic characters like Pippi Longstocking and Ramona Quimby were zany and unpredictable, but they certainly never told us where their hands wandered when they were alone. Even now, the mention of self-pleasure in a young adult book is enough to get it yanked from school libraries. Sherman Alexie’s terrific, award-winning 2007 novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian brings up masturbation within the first thirty pages: “If there were a Professional Masturbators League, I’d get drafted number one and make millions of dollars,” the fourteen-year-old narrator Arnold Spirit Jr. jokes.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian has been banned over and over again, across the country, for years. And that’s male masturbation; examples of adolescent female masturbation in books for teenagers are still fewer and far between. Melissa Febos writes about discovering self-pleasure as a pre-teen in 2021’s Girlhood—an essay collection for adults—and even now, her words feel radical. “The first time I slid on my back to the bottom of the tub, propped my heels on the wall aside the faucet and let that hot water pummel me, I understood that to crack my own hull was a glory,” she remembers. “Alone I was both ship and sea, and I felt no shame, only the cascade of pleasure.”

Over the course of Blume’s novel, there are three separate instances where Deenie refers to touching herself. In case there’s any question about what Blume means, she makes it crystal clear in a scene in the middle of the book, when Deenie attends a sex ed class at school. The gym teacher, responding to an anonymous question that Deenie wrote down and dropped in a box on her desk, tells the kids—and the readers—outright.

“Does anyone know the word for stimulating our genitals?” the teacher, named Mrs. Rappoport, asks the class. When a student timidly offers up the answer “masturbation,” Mrs. Rappoport is enthusiastic, encouraging the group to all say it aloud in unison. “Now that you’ve said it,” she goes on, “let me try to explain. First of all, it’s normal and harmless to masturbate.”

Deenie is relieved. After that, she’s happy to touch her special place as a way to de-stress. When she gets a nasty rash from wearing her brace with nothing under it, she takes a bath and tries to make peace with the fact that she’ll have to start wearing an undershirt to school, which she’s been resisting because it seems babyish. “The hot water was very relaxing and soon I began to enjoy it,” Deenie says. “I reached down and touched my special place with the washcloth. I rubbed and rubbed until I got that good feeling.”

Deenie wasn’t the first of Blume’s books to use the word “masturbation,” but it was the first one to portray it. Then Again, Maybe I Won’t does everything but—Tony Miglione talks about reading dirty novels, spying on his attractive neighbor as she gets changed, having wet dreams, and getting erections, but he doesn’t actually put his hands down his pants. The word comes up in a book, Basic Facts About Sex, that his father gives him after awkwardly bumbling through the sex talk. “There’s a whole section on wet dreams and another on masturbation,” Tony says after leafing through it. “Maybe they do know me after all!”

With Deenie, Blume was pushing the envelope and Jackson allowed it. And why not? It was 1973.

Stevie Wonder had radio listeners second-guessing their “Superstition.” There was “Smoke on the Water”—hair-raising, electric—and Marvin Gaye got people singing along to his smooth and sultry bedroom hit “Let’s Get It On” from behind the steering wheels of their cars. “There’s nothing wrong with me loving you. / Baby, no, no,” Gaye crooned—and you believed him. Nixon was still president but nobody trusted Tricky Dick anymore. The wheels of the Watergate scandal were already turning, poised to roll him straight out of the Oval Office.

Popular reading material was getting more explicit. The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking was written by an English physician named Alex Comfort, and it was a how-to manual for being more adventurous in bed. Comfort’s inspiration was The Joy of Cooking, the home cook’s go-to that had made elevated recipes more accessible. With his book, Comfort wanted to show how regular couples could also expand their erotic palates. The guide to everything from oral sex to light bondage even included line drawings of different sexual positions, which Comfort and his second wife, Jane Henderson, who had been his longtime mistress during his first marriage, had posed for. Clearly, there was an appetite for this kind of material—after it published in 1972, The Joy of Sex topped the New York Times bestseller list, and remained on it for much of the early 1970s.

Feminists were also doing their part to empower people with knowledge about their sexuality. In 1969, a group of women in their twenties and thirties, who called themselves the Boston Women’s Health Collective, set out to make teaching moments out of topics that had previously been considered unspeakable. They had met at a series of informal consciousness raising groups on the MIT campus, where attendees had gotten to talking about their frustrations with their male doctors. These physicians, they complained, were condescending and couldn’t be bothered to answer questions about their bodies. Finally, they had a safe space to open up about their concerns: What really happened to their insides during pregnancy? Why were they so miserable each month before getting their periods? And was there a trick to enjoying—like, really enjoying—sex?

The group, which was eventually whittled down to twelve women, made a list of topics and started researching them. They wrote up their findings in a booklet, published by the New England Free Press. The first print run of Our Bodies, Ourselves was 1,000 copies, and it sold out quickly. Another printing followed. After they sold over 200,000 books, major publishers started calling. In 1973, Simon & Schuster published an expanded version of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which covered everything from menstruation to abortion to postpartum depression. The illustrated tome, which included detailed drawings of the female anatomy and encouraged women to examine their vulvas and feel inside their own vaginas, was a phenomenon.

Even the informational books written for children were getting less stuffy. Where Did I Come From?, published in 1973, was the Age of Aquarius update on How Babies Are Made, featuring colorful, cartoon-like illustrations. Unlike the 1968 Time-Life staple, Where Did I Come From? scraps all references to the birds and bees and skips right to the important part: naked humans. The book features pictures of two doughy, average-looking adults in the buff, and walks young readers through their relevant anatomical differences. Living up to its promise “to tell the truth,” it spends five full pages explaining the process of sexual intercourse, making reference to erections (“the man’s penis becomes stiff and hard”), ejaculation, and orgasms.

The latter was especially daring, a break from popular wisdom that health education for kids should gloss over the part where sex feels good. This book, while sticking with the idea that heterosexual intercourse is necessarily procreative, broke new ground by acknowledging that sex isn’t just “special” and romantic—it’s pleasurable. “When the man and woman have been wriggling so hard you think they’re both going to pop, they nearly do just that,” author Peter Mayle explains. “All the rubbing up and down that’s been going on ends in a tremendous, big shiver for both of them,” which the book then goes on to compare to “a really big sneeze.”

Where Did I Come From? is often silly, as when it describes sperm as “romantic” and illustrates the point with a drawing of a googly-eyed, tadpole-like creature draped over a heart, sniffing a rose and decked out in black tie. “There’s some joy and fun in that book,” said Cory Silverberg, author of a series of gender- and family-inclusive sex ed books, including Sex Is a Funny Word. “A lot of the sex ed books feel like textbooks for kids, and Where Did I Come From? didn’t, because it was goofy.”

The playfulness of Where Did I Come From? made it innovative. It also signaled a new approach to sex ed that was primed to infuriate conservatives.

Deenie was published in September 1973, and as with Blume’s previous titles, reviews were mixed. The New York Times praised its “touching authenticity” as well as its candor: “It is also comfortably frank about the preoccupations of young teen-agers with sex, and deals in a tactful and reassuring way with such once undiscussable subjects as masturbation.” Kirkus, however, wasn’t keen on Deenie. Dismissing the novel as “bibliotherapeutic,” the trade magazine slammed Blume for the amount of space she devoted to the details of Deenie’s medical journey. Then, it got worse. “Instead of giving Deenie any personality or independent existence beyond her malady, the author throws in the subtopic of masturbation… which only makes the story’s hygienic slant more pronounced,” Kirkus said.