“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.
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.’ ”