Reading Judy Blume’s ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ made Zoe Whittall want to be a writer

There’s only one book-to-film adaptation I’ve been longing for since my days of buying training bras from the 1986 Sears catalogue and it’s finally here.

“Are you There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” the adaptation of Judy Blume’s famous middle-grade novel. The book was a 1970s New York Times bestseller and remains on the American Library Association’s list of 100 most frequently banned books to this day, perhaps because it talks about menstruation and secular, interfaith marriage — subjects that should be mundane by today’s standards, but if you’ve been on the internet lately you may notice we are currently hurtling backwards away from social progress when it comes to children’s rights, feminism and antisemitism.

It was the book that made me want to be a writer.

When I was 11 years old my mother bought me an electronic typewriter for Christmas and I spent the mostly snowed-in winter months of 1988-’89 in front of the bay window of our farmhouse writing novels and stapling them together using pages from a wallpaper sample book. I wrote in first person prose, aping my favourite novelist, Judy Blume. Starting in second grade with “Super Fudge,” then “Deenie.” But the one that started my obsession in the fourth grade was “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”

I read every Judy Blume book I could find in the library, especially “Forever” and “Tiger Eyes,” and even the ones meant for adults.

It’s hard to imagine now, but at that time there wasn’t much culturally on offer for tween girls.

My prize for being an advanced reader in school was to read “The Hobbit,” which honestly felt like a punishment. There was L.M. Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables,” of course, and Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” and later YA novelists like Paula Danziger and Gordon Korman. But Judy Blume’s classic was the first book — before I started reading about those blond-haired, blue-eyed Wakefield Twins or the plucky do-good members of “The Baby-Sitters Club” — to be written in the first-person voice of a girl who couldn’t wait to grow up, and who wasn’t solving mysteries or wearing old-timey dresses — the only mystery was self-discovery and the form was realism.

Though I hate using the word relatable, I would also argue that possibly the only time it’s important for books to be relatable is when you’re 11. It was my first experience of verisimilitude in literature and that connection made me think I could do it too.

I deeply related to Margaret — the kid who wanted to say what was in her head, speak back to the bossy girl, say what she’s really feeling and finally be a real teenager. She was only selectively brave, often awkward, figuring out who she wanted to be.

I remembered the book as being mostly about a girl’s quest to finally get her period and be more than a minus-A cup, doing those infamous I Must Increase My Bust exercises with her three best friends. It had been slightly dated in the ’80s — menstrual products had become more sophisticated, the gender roles slightly less exaggerated post Marlo Thomas’s “Free to Be … You and Me” project and album — but the core of Margaret’s journey of self-discovery felt timeless.

In my 40s, my best friend gave me a gift of first edition paperbacks of all the Judy Blume classics and I have them displayed on a special shelf. But I hadn’t read Margaret or any Blume book since the 1980s.

In anticipation of the movie — and writing this — I sat down and read the novel in one sitting, and was just engaged as I’d been as a child. The vulnerable, quirky inner monologue stood the test of time. Reading it at 47, I was struck by several things — the book is not only about menstruation and training bras and crushes on boys called Phillip Leroy — it’s also, perhaps mostly, about religion.

It’s right there in the title, but somehow the memory of the book being specifically about puberty had obscured the core plot of the book for me.

Margaret is 11, the child of a Christian mom whose own parents abandoned her when she married a Jewish man. Margaret’s parents react to this shunning by raising her without religion, something considered quite radical at the time and which presents a problem when they move her out of New York City to a New Jersey suburb where most of the kids she meets go to Sunday school.

She feels like she doesn’t have a team to belong to, so she sets out on a quest to decide which religion to choose. She visits various churches with her schoolmates and, instead of having a meaningful spiritual experience, she counts hats and watches people, wondering what they’re feeling.

She has a loving relationship with her paternal grandmother, one of my favourite characters while reading the book as an adult, who is delighted to take her to temple and hopes she’ll decide to be Jewish. Her antisemitic grandparents visit once after a 14-year absence and cruelly cut their visit short when they learn their daughter hasn’t softened her position on religion one bit. The book explores what it’s like to search for meaning in a world where adults often make self-determination difficult.

In 2023, it’s difficult to know if the movie is going to speak to its intended core preteen audience, or if it will simply be a satisfying nostalgic co-watch for the adults who remember finding solace in Margaret Simon’s teen dream quest of self-discovery.

Judy Blume herself made headlines last week when a U.K. journalist baited her into supporting the controversial author J.K. Rowling, which Blume swiftly corrected by stating her unequivocal support for the LGBTQ community — “anything to the contrary is total bulls–t” she wrote on Twitter.

It’s safe to say that Blume continues to be a bright light of empathy for kids to admire today, standing up for the underdogs and quiet observers, meaningfully trying to discover who they are.

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