Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (25 page)

Sure, there have been other issues in my life, and I imagine there will be more. For starters: I'm older than I'd like to be and still single. My friends tell me I have to go on Match.com. Deadlines freak me out, which isn't the best thing, considering I'm at work in a pretty deadline-heavy field. My personality could be categorized with some degree of ease under the general umbrella of neurotic. And I think there might be some other things, too. Though for the sake of brevity and privacy, I'll resist the temptation to digress.

But I can say with all certainty that having Margaret there for the first things I ever saw as issues in my life made me feel at once understood and not alone. Something I'd later understand as a universal thing that books can do and would make me want to read them all, and eventually once I got my nerve up, write them, too. The friendship I had with Margaret showed me that it was okay, that it was perfectly fine, to be a late bloomer, to feel different, and to have no religion but still believe in God. It told me that my feelings made sense and it told me that it was okay. It told me that other people, even people with churches and temples and big boobs to call their own, felt that way, too.

I wish that there had been an entire series of
Margaret,
that I'd been able to see Margaret navigate her way through high school, college, and early career choices; through the weddings and first children of her friends, asking God if maybe he could hurry up with her soul mate, since he had repeatedly ignored her requests for anything other than an A cup. I'm quite sure I would have felt some solace in seeing Margaret up on the fifth floor of Blooming-dales, debating the merits of the Wonderbra. Or perhaps logging onto Match.com and checking off “spiritual but not religious” under religion and taking some solace of her own in the fact that so many other Internet daters have checked off that unaffiliated box, too. I think Margaret would have really liked that. And as much on her behalf as on my own, I do, too.