I was going to do horror today, but the National Book Awards have distracted me. The organization has given its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Judy Blume, and that makes me glad on so many levels I don’t even know where to start. Coincidentally, Blume has also earned the dubious distinction of being the most censored writer of the last 15 years, as determined by the American Library Association. And that’s the kind of street cred you just can’t buy.
Like she needs it. Growing up, I didn’t know anyone who didn’t read Blume. Or, if I knew such creatures, I promptly pretended not to. She talked directly to adolescent experience without the filter, without metaphor to make it somehow acceptable. Boys could learn the mysteries of the period from a much more reliable source than a film strip. Her books were filled with middle-class misfits just like me, running up against those withering moments of childhood and surviving. (I wouldn’t go so far as to say anyone triumphed in a Blume book, but sometimes scraping through seemed like the best one could hope for.)
In her acceptance speech, Blume said, “It makes me sad and angry that encouraging young people to think for themselves makes you subversive.” Let me tell you, it was a rite of passage to get your hands on one of the “restricted” Blume books, and I didn’t know anyone who didn’t manage it. (My parents were pretty lax about what I read. If the television wasn’t on, they were happy, so I could wander through the house with my nose in East of Eden without incident.)
Blume even played a direct role in my development as geeky social outcast. One of my junior high arch-nemeses (everyone had a couple of those, didn’t they?) had a birthday party that was attended by Blume, and Susan, the dark one, invited virtually everyone at my school but me. (Susan disapproved of my corrective orthopedic shoes and superior achievement test scores, and I thought she was the poster child of money overcoming overwhelmingly negative personal qualities to ensure popularity.)
But junior high school was all about reading as subversion. Being a geek and finding anything preferable to spending unsupervised time with my peers (study hall), I volunteered at the paperback library. The teacher who ran the little room paid absolutely no attention to what her volunteers did, so co-worker Robbie and I would spend the hour searching through the shelves for every salacious passage we could find. And there were lots of them. They couldn’t have actually read the novelization of Grease before they put it on the shelves, could they? By my seventh-grade standards, it was the best kind of filth. In a collection of short stories, we also learned that sometimes people wore pants without underwear on beneath them. That was worth an entire semester of horrified speculation. In the book of “kid-friendly” urban legends, we learned just how much people suck with our first exposure to the Kitty Genovese story. (The author didn’t skimp on the stabbings, let me tell you.)
Besides Blume, my favorite books growing up were generally about misfits. I loved Madeleine L’Engle’s books. The Chocolate War was a revelation. Other favorites were The Chronicles of Narnia and Encyclopedia Brown. I keep meaning to see what’s out there in terms of contemporary kids’ fiction, though I generally have such an daunting “to read” pile that I never quite get around to it. One book, though, made it into the rotation, and I’m so glad it did. Louis Sachar’s Holes is one of the best books I’ve ever read, no matter who its intended audience is. It’s one of those perfectly constructed stories that just takes your breath away with its craft and heart. And it has that “misfits triumph” structure that I can’t resist.
In other Book Week News, Ed Cunard busts out the love for pop culture tomes and lit crit.