Your books allow girls to see themselves as sexual beings rather than objects. How do you feel about this? Was this a deliberate decision?
I love that idea. I never thought about it ever. It wasn't a deliberate decision. Now that you mention it, it makes me feel really good. I guess I never thought about it because that's just how it was for me. I was a sexual being, not a sexual object, from the time I was quite young. I can remember having fantasies in the 4th and 5th grade, and sexual play in 6th grade and I never had any negative feelings about it. No one ever made me feel negative about it. Nobody ever knew, probably (except my playmates).
So, then was your own girlhood or adolescence sexually positive?
Sexually, yeah, it was pretty positive. Maybe I was lucky too because I wasn't the only one. I had friends and we were all doing the same thing. We didn't even know what it was and we didn't know enough not to talk about it. Like in Deenie, we all had our special place and we could get that good feeling.
None of us had ever heard the word masturbation. It was years before I heard the word masturbation. We had our way to discuss it. It was like, "Oh, you have that, too? Oh great." Then we'd go away to summer camp and it was a whole different group but I can remember the same discussion. "Oh, you do that too, where you live? Oh, yes, so do we."
How did you learn about sex?
I looked up sex in my World Book Encyclopedia when I was probably in 5th or 6th grade, and all that I found were overlays showing plant reproduction. It wasn't very satisfying. My father meant to be very open with us, but it didn't really work. He always said, you can come to me, I'll always talk to you. He tried to tell me about menstruation when I was about nine, but I didn't really get it. My friend Rozzy's mother gave her a book and Rozzy and I read it a lot. It wasn't very good but at least it was something.
My mother said nothing about anything, ever, which may have been not so terrible in the long run because while she didn't say anything positive, she didn't say anything negative either. She just didn't say anything.
I just read a recently published, wonderful book for girls, called It's A Girl Thing by Mavis Jukes. It's an information book for girls about growing up, about making decisions, about everything. I recommend it.
What was your own girlhood/adolescence like?
Well, I can tell you that my most autobiographical book is Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. That was my family and that was the kind of kid I was at 10--very imaginative. When I look back, I think I was a much more interesting child than I was a teenager. By the time I was a teenager, all I cared about was fitting in, being like everybody else. Boring, boring concerns...boys, clothes, all of that junk. But the real person, I think, the real Judy was more 10 & 11 & 12. That was a person who interests me but the teenage Judy really doesn't interest me at all.
How did you first get into writing about girls, puberty and adolescent sexuality?
I was a creative kid in school and then I got married when I was a junior in college and before I was 25, I had two babies. I think I was going a little cuckoo. I loved taking care of my kids but I really needed some other outlet.
I just sat down and started. I had a lot of false starts. I really didn't know anything about being grown up even though I had two kids and was married. When I looked inside, it was the 12 year old that I was close to. And then I said, I know I remember everything about 6th grade. Totally, I mean everything. I have total recall of 6th grade and I am going to write a book and tell what it was like for me. It doesn't mean that it was true for everybody but it was my reality. And that's when I wrote Margaret. [Are You There God? It's Me Margaret]
Margaret just poured right out, you know, I didn't stop and think. It was a fresh voice, it was new. I didn't know that it was controversial. Of course, I don't think it is controversial but other people do. I didn't know anything about publishing
or marketing or even writing, but a few years later kids started to write to me and they continue to write today.
