Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume

by Jennifer OConnell

  Which was what I thought we were all looking for. Sisters, not girlfriends. Family.

  But:

  Women are tough, we said, smiling at one another. It’s always a battle to find good female friends.

  In Just As Long As We’re Together, Stephanie and Rachel’s friendship is tested and ultimately changed by the arrival of Alison, the new girl in town. Stephanie and Alison become fast friends, leaving Rachel out in the cold—or so it feels to Rachel. Rachel and Stephanie fight about all manner of other things in the course of the novel, only coming to terms with what was really going on in the final pages:

  Halfway there I said, “You want to talk about it?”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  “I don’t even remember how it started.”

  “You told Amber that Max liked me.”

  “Oh, right…I never did get what was so bad about that.”

  “It was just the last straw,” Rachel said. “I was so mad at you by then.”

  “For what?”

  “Because you didn’t like me anymore.”

  “No,” I said, “you were the one who didn’t like me!”

  “I didn’t like you because you didn’t like me!” Rachel said. “You were best friends with Alison and everyone knew it.”

  “But you had Stacey Green,” I told her. “You didn’t want to be my best friend anymore.”

  “That’s because you didn’t want to be mine!” Rachel shifted her books from one arm to the other. “I felt it was some kind of competition…me against Alison…and I was always losing.”

  Judy Blume, Just As Long As We’re Together (Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1987), pp. 292–293.

  What strikes me when I reread this book, the one I first read long ago when I was navigating best friendships with girls I only dimly remember now, is how very much like romantic relationships these female best friendships are. They require so much care. So much interest in another’s details, thoughts, and emotions. So much effort and attention. The lasting forms of these friendships ease into something like family. The other ones flare and then disappear.

  These days, I don’t have a best friend. I have close friends but no all-encompassing best friend. I suspect that now, having found The One, there’s no longer a space for that kind of relationship. I only have so much emotional energy, after all, and if I were to expend so much of it on the maintenance of a friendship like those breathtaking ones of old, what would be left for my partner? My work? Me?

  But I don’t mean to suggest that you can’t have both a Significant Other and best friends. I just don’t think you can have a Significant Other and A Very Best Best Friend, with whom you are far too close, in a toxic sort of way.

  As you grow older, I think the emotional dependency of that kind of Best Friendship has to ebb away or there would never be any space to form the sort of emotional attachment you need to have with your life partner. Or the sort of relationship that now, in my thirties, I am pleased to have with myself. (Note to teenage self: It’s true, you can like yourself. Really.)

  But knowing that this ebbing is probably inevitable makes me wonder if some of the tensions in those vibrant, heedless, wondrous best friendships come from the fact that they aren’t The Real Thing. Seventeen hours of discussing mundane details on the telephone won’t take the place of a lover or a spouse, though perhaps they help fill a space. No wonder these relationships contain as much darkness as they do light—they’re saddled with an unbearable weight. No wonder it’s so rare that we maintain them in the same form forever.

  The best sorts of friendships are the ones that adapt. The ones that flex to fit you both as you need them. That seems like common sense, but it’s very hard to find, because not everyone changes at the same time or in the same way. Sometimes friendships are meant to end the moment circumstances change.

  Maybe this is what T. discovered as she met and fell in love with her husband (whose name I don’t even know). This was always her unapologetic goal, no matter her success: to locate her husband and make her own family. Maybe she discovered, years before I would, that things have to change when that happens. That these partings are inevitable and perhaps even necessary, and because I could not have understood why this was so at the time, she neglected to tell me. And then just disappeared.

  But all of this supposes that T. was the one to make all the decisions, as if I had no part in what happened. When, in fact, I knew I was letting go of her. As each day passed, as each week became a month and I failed to act, I was making a choice. As I look back over the other best friendships I’ve had that also ended, I wonder if, in addition to simply having a finite amount of room for such intimacy, we also have certain periods in our lives in which we seek out people who seem to embody the things we lack. Then, when we gain those things for ourselves, we no longer need that friend in the same way, which causes a serious dissonance in the relationship. Perhaps this is why these particular friendships burn so bright and then disappear so completely.

  What I desperately admired about T. was her strength in worlds that confused and scared me. She was so capable. Successful. Alternatively, I was a complete mess and decidedly unsuccessful at anything that did not involve lying on my couch eating chocolate and watching Buffy. As I climbed my way out of the depression of my twenties, I found that I wasn’t as messy as I thought. And that as it turned out, I had the chance to be successful in my own right. When this happened, I think the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction for our friendship. The last thing I needed was a friend who seemed to treat me as if I was the same person I’d been before. That messed-up, ruined girl I’d finally put behind me. And I think one of the things T. needed very much was to be needed.

  I think we simply outgrew each other.

  When I was in high school, I had a best friend who was closer to me than members of my actual family. J. and I were ridiculously, disastrously close. We called each other the Death Twins, to indicate both our bond and our oh-so-jaded outlook on life. (Which is hilarious when I look back at my preppy self, complete with pegged jeans. I was about as jaded as a wide-eyed singing and dancing Disney cartoon.) J. and I were so tight that when we drove around with her boyfriend, he was banished to the backseat so as not to disturb our bond.

  Then college intervened. We separated and found other friends in our separate colleges. We fought bitterly (and one night, memorably, with our hands) and didn’t speak for a long time. Years, I think.

  And here’s the difference between Best Friendships and Actual Romantic Relationships: In the former, you really can have space. Years of it, if necessary, and then sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can find your way back.

  J. wrote me a Christmas card years later, and in so doing, reactivated our friendship. We will never be as claustrophobically, suffocatingly close as we were in high school. Instead, we can be friends. At last.

  I think about this a lot when I think about T. and wonder why our relationship followed the trajectory it did.

  There are things that I know about myself that I would never have learned without T. in my life. Some of those things are incredibly unpleasant, it’s true, but that might be what friends are for. There were times when she seemed to be the only thing between me and a great darkness I feared I might get lost in. We were silly together in a way I have never re-created with another friend and don’t imagine I ever will. I miss the stories that only she knows, the jokes that only she gets. As I wrote somewhere else, losing a friend is like losing a language, and I miss the one we spoke together. I loved her with the whole of my heart, and I can’t regret that. There is no reason not to imagine that some day one of us will reach out, the other will be receptive, and we will reaccess that intricate, secret world that we shared.

  Although, let’s hope, in a less all-consuming fashion.

  It is also possible that T. and I will never reconnect, never so much as speak again, and that’s fine, too. I don’t wish her ill. Quite the opposite. I like to think she’s out
there wielding that smile of hers like a weapon behind lush MAC cosmetics. I hope the husband she chose is worth the wonderful woman I knew once, whose fierce defense of those she loved was awesome to behold.

  Reading Judy Blume taught me this lesson long before I would have to learn it for myself. You can’t hold on to people. Sometimes you have to let them go. Rachel knows that Stephanie and Alison are closer to each other than to her, and in Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson, she finds a way to come to terms with it. As we all must do.

  I believe that people come into your life for a reason, and it’s up to you to learn the lessons they can teach you. I believe best friends teach us how to be better people, and to do that they sometimes have to leave you to do it yourself. T. taught me a great deal—much of which, I imagine, will take me years to fully understand. That’s the gift of friendship. It changes, even after the friendship ends. I don’t need to speak to T. again to keep the memory of her—both good and bad—in a special place in my heart.

  I like to think she’s out there, happy, remembering me in the same bittersweet way.

  “You can have more than one best friend at a time,” I said.

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because best means best.”

  I thought about that. “What about close?” I asked.

  “You can have more than one close friend at a time, can’t you?”

  Rachel thought that over. “I guess so.”

  “And close is as good as best!”

  “I don’t necessarily agree,” Rachel said.

  “But it’s better to be friends than not to be friends…you agree with that, right?”

  “Well, yes,” Rachel said, “if you’re talking about true friends.”

  Judy Blume, Just As Long As We’re Together (Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1987), pp. 293–294.

  Megan Crane is grateful to her best friends, all of whom suffered through her teens and twenties with her and still helped inspire her to write English as a Second Language, Everyone Else’s Girl, and Frenemies. Why they allowed her to sport that atrocious haircut remains a mystery.

  Cry, Linda, Cry

  Meg Cabot

  She had big brown eyes, an elfin smile, soft, curly brown hair, and go-go boots…the kind of boots Julie on Mod Squad wore. The kind of boots none of our mothers would get for us, no matter how much we pleaded, because they were too expensive and too grown up for us. Even her T-shirt was new and different—TNT, it read across the budding mounds of what were destined (possibly at any moment) to become actual boobs: Talent, Not Talk.

  Her name was as exotic as the place from which she’d moved—Shoshona. And she’d transferred into Mrs. Hunter’s fourth-grade class at Elm Heights Elementary School in Bloomington, Indiana, all the way from Canada.

  And she was about to make my existence a living hell.

  I didn’t know it, of course. And if someone had told me, I wouldn’t have believed it. Everyone knew that bullies didn’t come in four-foot, sixty-pound packages, with brand-new solid gold post earrings and Goody barrettes.

  Everyone, that is, except for Judy Blume.

  Too often in books, schools are depicted as nurturing, caring environments where bullies either don’t exist, or on the rare occasions when they do crop up, they come from troubled homes. They’re “victims,” just like the children they’ve terrorized. Eventually, when the child the bully has been tormenting comes to understand that her bully doesn’t have a daddy or lives in a trailer park instead of middle-class suburbia, she forgives and even eventually befriends the bully, and everyone gets along.

  Yeah. Right.

  Judy Blume is careful not to give Blubber that kind of After-School Special ending. True to life, the victim and the bully in Blubber do not become friends, the bully is never even punished for her crimes, nor is there any obvious lesson learned. While the protagonist, through becoming a target of bullying herself, comes to understand that by tolerating the bullying of others, she did something wrong, this is portrayed subtly, so subtly that the careless—or youthful—reader might miss it entirely.

  Still, even if in the fourth grade I’d known there was such a thing as pretty female bullies, I was hardly the victim type. Like Blubber’s heroine, Jill, I was as average as a kid could be—not too smart but not too dumb; not too fat but not too skinny; not too short but not too tall. I was completely normal…a little shy, maybe, but I got along with all my peers and had a tight group of friends, some of whom I am still in touch with today, thirty years later.

  Sure, my family wasn’t the most well off, and my mom made a lot of my clothes. But I attended a school populated by children of academics—college professors who valued books over designer jeans and had successfully shielded their children from the knowledge that they might be missing out on current trends, as the Internet hadn’t been invented yet, and the only channels any of us got were the three major networks and PBS (and Cowboy Bob on local station 4).

  There was nothing physically to set me apart from my peers—just as Judy Blume is careful to point out there is nothing physical that sets her bully’s victim, Linda, apart from the other children in her class. Linda is slightly overweight. But there are other children in the class who are larger—who could even be classified as fat—and Wendy, the book’s antagonist, doesn’t pick on them. Perhaps because of the title, I’ve often seen Blubber categorized as a book about a fat girl who gets tormented by her peers. But the discerning reader soon realizes that the reason Linda is picked on has nothing to do with her weight (although her weight is the subject about which Linda is most sensitive and therefore the subject on which Wendy chooses to focus the majority of her taunts) and that the term blubber doesn’t have as much to do with Linda’s size as it does her personality—or lack thereof.

  No, Linda is picked on by Wendy for the same reason that my bully, Shoshona, picked on me.

  We, the victims, allow it to happen.

  Oh, yes. I went there. I, like Judy Blume, am putting the blame—well, part of it, anyway—on the victim herself. In today’s society—thirty years post-Blubber and Shoshona—it may be considered politically incorrect to say these girls asked for it. But Jill’s mother’s suggestion—that her daughter “laugh off” the taunts that are making her life so hellish—is still the best advice a parent can give to a child in such a situation (although obviously a call to the teacher who has allowed such bullying to go on under her very nose is also recommended). Judy Blume herself, when describing Blubber on her Web site, writes:

  A person who can laugh at herself will be respected, right?

  But Linda doesn’t laugh. And maybe that’s the problem. There’s something about her that makes Jill and a lot of kids in her fifth-grade class want to see how far they can go.

  Bullying is about power. And those who wield power can quickly turn on others, even those who once considered them friends—especially those who lack the inner resources to laugh at or stand up for themselves. I considered Shoshona a friend, although truthfully we had nothing in common. At ten years old, I still considered playing with Barbies the height of amusement, a pastime Shoshona looked down upon, although she didn’t seem to have any better suggestions as to what else we might do while playing together. Drawing, reading, and board games were all “dumb” to her. One memorable playdate included Shoshona asking me to sit in a desk chair that spun, then twirling me around and around in it until I begged her to stop (true to form, when I asked her to stop, she wouldn’t…until I threw up, that is. Shoshona, disgusted, stomped home, not even apologizing for making me sick…or, as my parents later discovered, for breaking the chair).

  You might think an afternoon that ended in vomit would have dampened my enthusiasm about pursuing a friendship with a person who disdained the pursuits I enjoyed yet could think of no alternative activities, save those that caused me to lose my lunch and ruined my parents’ furniture.

  But that was the power Shoshona held over me—the same po
wer Wendy, in Blubber, holds over Jill. I was shy. Shoshona was not. I was willing to let others have their way in an effort to get them to like me. Shoshona was not. I, along with the rest of the girls in my class, worshipped Shoshona the way Jill, in Blubber, worships Wendy—the way any ten-year-

  old worships a natural leader—even though it turned out her T-shirt had lied: Shoshona had no discernible talents. She couldn’t sing, for instance, like my friend Becky, or do backflips, like my friend Erika, or do fractions in her head, like Barbara. In fact, Shoshona was almost No Talent and All Talk.

  The desk chair incident was devastating to me. Shoshona had come to my house, and she had a bad time! How would I ever live it down? How would I get back in her good graces?

  I felt even worse when my attempt to redeem myself in Shoshona’s eyes by having a “cool” birthday party with a Freaky Friday theme—everyone was to come dressed as their mother—fell flat. My friends Becky, Erika, and Barbara arrived dressed like me, in long trailing gowns with white gloves, loaded down with rhinestone jewelry, giggling like mad. Shoshona, however, didn’t dress in her mother’s clothes. She wore an exact replica of her mother’s clothes—but in her own size: business attire for the busy ten-year-old executive. She narrowed her eyes at the rest of us in our floppy hats and too-big high heels and told us we looked like a “bunch of babies.”

  We were only too ready to agree with her. Being Canadian, Shoshona seemed hopelessly cosmopolitan. She had some very fancy ways compared to us Hoosiers. It was Shoshona who introduced our class to the titillating concept of “going together.” She and Jeff Niehardt were going together by the end of Shoshona’s first day at Elm Heights. It didn’t take much longer than that for most of the rest of the class to pair up.