Read Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume for Free Online Page A

read about Karen Newman when I was twelve, it would have certainly saved me a lot of sleepless nights, wondering what was wrong with me. It would have been comforting to know that it wasn’t my hips or my taste in men that catapulted me into womanhood. I would have understood that by the time you turn twelve, you’re not supposed to feel like a little girl anymore, and that if your parents don’t split up, there’s likely to be some other surprise around the corner that will shock you into growing up well before you’re ready.
    How was I supposed to know I wasn’t the only one? Had I looked a little deeper, I might have noticed that my friends weren’t really little kids anymore, either. Their hearts were also being shattered left and right, their innocence slipping through the cracks. We were all being forced out of our comfort zones whether or not we liked it or knew it. I guess I thought if I could get my parents back together and finally find the right underwear, I could make it all stop. But the train had already left the station.
    Now I’m sitting here surrounded by dozens of Judy Blume books. Sometimes I find myself staring at the back cover of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and I think about all the twelve-year-old-
girls out there who must have read that book, girls who were new in school or whose parents couldn’t agree on how to bring them up, or girls who had no idea who to ask for help in making sense of the utter chaos that is seventh grade. All those girls who thought they were the only one in the world like that. I wonder how many of them felt like Blubber, or how many of them knew their friends were no different than the girls who made fun of Blubber, and if reading about it made a difference in how they led their lives from then on. Judy Blume was the first woman to look girls straight in the eye and tell it the way it is. No one had ever thought to tell us that all that strangeness going on in our bodies wasn’t strange at all, and no one ever talked to us about other girls. It’s amazing that we ever got along without her.
    I wonder if Judy Blume really knows how many girls’ lives she affected. I wonder if she knows that at least one of her books made a grown woman finally feel like she’d been a normal girl all along, and I wonder, if by any chance at all, she’d happen to know where I could find a really good girdle.
    Stephanie Lessing began her career as a writer in kindergarten. It was at that time that she began her research on girl behavior in an attempt to figure out what was wrong with her. Her psychoanalytical approach to studying female behavior produced many acclaimed essays, including “Why Am I the Only One with an Umbrella?” and “What I Wouldn’t Give for Missy Cohen’s Culottes.”
    Prior to publishing her first novel, She’s Got Issues, Stephanie Lessing designed promotional campaigns and advertising material for Conde Nast publications, and she often writes about her New York City experiences working at Vogue, Glamour, Self, Vanity Fair, and Mademoiselle on her blog: www.stephanielessing.com. Stephanie lives in New Jersey with her husband and their two children. Her second novel, Miss Understanding, was recently published.

Boys Like Shiny Things
    Laura Ruby
    â€œHey Ma…” I called. “Here’s the bus.”
    As we got on, the bus driver greeted me with, “Hi, Beautiful.”
    Ma gave him a big smile and said, “Deenie’s the beauty, Helen’s the brain.”
    â€” Deenie
    Manhattan, the trendy meatpacking district. Pastis, the “it” bar of the moment. Beverly air-kisses the stunning man guarding the door against badly dressed invaders from Staten Island and New Jersey. I grew up in New Jersey, but it’s not something you’d admit to here.
    â€œHe was voted one of the fifty most beautiful New Yorkers,” says my friend