In Praise of Harriet the Spy

Click here to listen to a radio tribute to the central character of one my childhood favourite books, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. I think that I'm overdue for a reread of this one.

Judy Blume's Forever

Judy Blume on her frequently-suppressed novel Forever:

I ask her whether she was aware when she wrote Forever - at once her most loved and most reviled book - of the effect it would have. She shakes her head. 'No, no, no. Who knows things like that? If you do, then you are not going to meet with success because it's going to be so contrived.' She says she wrote the book for her teenage daughter: 'She asked me for a story about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die,' recalls Blume. 'She had read several novels about teenagers in love. If they had sex, the girl was always punished - an unplanned pregnancy, a hasty trip to a relative in another state, a grisly abortion, sometimes even death. Lies. Secrets. Girls in these books had no sexual feelings and boys had no feelings other than sexual.'

For the rest of Melissa Whitworth’s interview with Blume, click here.

I’m not sure that I ever read Forever. But I do vividly recall being taunted with sexual terminology from it by one of the popular girls in my sixth grade class along the following lines:

Popular girl: Do you know what _____ means?

Me: Of course I know what _____ means.

Popular girl: Tell me what it means then.

Me: Um...

Because, of course, I had no idea what _____ meant.

However, I had read all of the Blume books that were available in the children’s department of the library (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Deenie; and, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t all stand out in my memory), and my experience with the sixth-grade bully didn’t sour me on those. It just made me determined to find out what _____ meant. All of which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to get a copy of Everything I Needed to Know about Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, a collection of essays by noted female authors about Blume's enduring influence on their lives and work. Perhaps I should have a go at writing such an essay myself…

Beverly Cleary

There's a lovely essay by Denise Hamilton in this weekend’s Los Angeles Times on her enduring fondness for the books of Beverly Cleary. Click here to read it.

I haven't reread Cleary's tales about Ramona and Beezus Quimby since childhood though they were certainly favourites back then. I do periodically return to her YA books Fifteen and The Luckiest Girl though. I suspect that these books are too innocent for today's sophisticated YA readership, but I love them still. And I highly recommend Cleary's two-volume memoir, A Girl From Yamhill and My Own Two Feet. The memoirs are a particular treat for Cleary fans of course, but will also be of interest, I think, to anyone intrigued by how writers and books are formed.