To us, Margaret Simon wasn’t a character, she was a proxy - for the girl who stuffed socks in her bra, who felt uncomfortable in her own skin for the girl who was homesick for a friend who had matured overnight or moved away or turned mean for the girl who struggled to make sense of the diagrams on the origami-folded instructions inside the tampon box. “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” was her clarion call. Into this siloed world marched Judy Blume, bearing news of other tweens (a term that hadn’t been coined yet). Movies were in theaters, music was on the radio and news landed on the front steps once a day with a thud. If we were really lucky, we had a rotary phone with a cord that stretched to our bedroom.
We were told we were equal, but “boys will be boys” was still a perfectly acceptable response to boorish behavior. We were girls who loved puffy stickers, fruit roll-ups, jelly shoes, Madonna bracelets and Cabbage Patch Kids. It would be hard to overstate how important the book “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” was to the girls of Generation X, especially the subset I grew up with a few exits north of the (fictional) New Jersey suburb where it takes place. Words like “obsessed” and “adore” hovered over the room, heavy with italics. This was an event, with a photographer, two hashtags - #itsmemargaret and #margaretmoment - and humans of every age, gender, race and manner of ironic eyewear one-upping each other’s devotion to the story we were there to celebrate.
Unfortunately, I’d stopped reading the invitation after “Please join us for an afternoon with Judy Blume” what more did I need to know? Alas, this gathering wasn’t going to be the intimate affair I’d imagined, the one where Blume and I sat in an empty theater and bonded over a box of Milk Duds. Mine said, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Elisabeth.” One table was piled high with copies of Blume’s book, another with personalized diaries. The hip SoHo hangout was abuzz with laughing, chatting, selfie-snapping, champagne-sipping fans of the novel that launched a thousand breast enhancement exercises and frank conversations about puberty. When I arrived at the Crosby Street Hotel for a screening of “ Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” a man in the lobby located my name on a list, then directed me to a line for the coat check.
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