I’ve been reading EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT BEING A GIRL I LEARNED FROM JUDY BLUME, edited by Jennifer O’Connell (who writes for adults in that name and young adults as Jenny O’Connell). Which, so far, has been kind of disappointing. Many of the essays — despite some notable exceptions — are almost astonishingly poorly written (considering they’re all written by professional novelists — though not, I suppose, essayists), and most are oddly didactic as well.
In that last vein, the most peculiar that I’ve read so far has got to be Jennifer Coburn’s meditation on “White Guilt,” ostensibly about Blume’s IGGY’S HOUSE. After a plot summary of that book, most of the essay consists of Coburn assuring us many, many, many times that her efforts to prove herself the most enlightened and anti-racist white person ever were misguided and condescending… and actually, I do respect her willingness to recount some of her more unfortunate activities in this regard.
It’s possible I would have judged the essay as a whole more charitably had it not explained early on that Coburn’s New York City upbringing suffered no lack of diversity; after all, as a sixteen-year-old she once shared a cab with a “Middle Eastern dignitary.” …Seriously. It’s the kind of statement that you feel must be intended as irony or satire, except surrounded as it is by more normally earnest statements about the ethnic mix at her schools, I think it’s… not.
The essay as a whole mostly just made me sad: here’s someone who’s obviously quite horrified by racism; we’re in a country where 1 in 15 Black men are in prison or jail and where the Black middle class is perhaps being obliterated, and the (published!) preoccupations of an anti-racist are… this?
One thing I am enjoying about EVERYTHING I LEARNED, though, is seeing some variety in what in Blume’s work spoke to folks. There’s a particular example that struck me, which, now that I’ve puzzled over Coburn’s essay for a lot longer than I expected, will have to be taken up in my next post…
-->Feed me text
June 26, 2009 at 4:37 pm
This is disappointing; I love the idea of this book. Sigh. Are there any essays you would recommend unreservedly?
June 26, 2009 at 8:27 pm
I’ve been wanting to read this, too. Doesn’t sound like it lives up to my expectations! (I’ll still take it out of the library.)
June 27, 2009 at 12:16 am
That essay stuck out for me, too…and I was disappointed with the book, as a whole. I would have been better off spending the time reading actual Judy Blume.
June 27, 2009 at 1:47 am
Well put, Caroline. I think there’s something that maybe doesn’t quite work about this genre; I still haven’t read much of it, but after buying DEAR ANGELA (essays on My So-Called Life, i.e., should be made for me) in immense excitement, I found the parts I read incredibly disappointing. The essay by the volume’s editor had a few embarrassing factual errors, and overall I thought the level of analysis was far below what we used to kick around in a normal week on my MSCL fan listserv back in the day.
Aishwarya: I did like Megan McCafferty’s essay, which is the first in the book. And I haven’t read it all yet, so some gems may yet emerge.
It is one of those things, though, where you feel like, this should have been so good…
June 27, 2009 at 3:41 pm
I love the idea of the book too. I love Judy Blume. I think I might have to get it (from the library anyway), but the one you mentioned sounds awful, about the white guilt. Cringe worthy.
June 27, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Yeah, I’m not sorry that I’m reading it, I’m just disappointed. And actually, the last three pieces that I read — by Elise Juska, Krya Davis, and Beth Kendrick — were more interesting; Juska’s was probably my favorite of those three.
Kendrick’s piece is about something we’ve discussed, on (not) identifying as kids with the adult characters in books but doing so when rereading as adults, and was interesting to me because that topic interests me.
But her piece was also emblematic of the sloppiness that’s annoying me in this book, considering it’s all professional writers. Like:
…Really, that’s unusual? I would’ve thought it was the case for a majority of YA authors, at least at some point during their careers. There’s just a lot of little stuff like that that grates on me more than it probably should.
On a similar theme (what kids do/don’t learn about adults’ emotional lives from what they read), one essay I’d forgotten but that I liked is Laura Caldwell’s, titled “Do adults really do that? Does Judy Blume really do that?”
Of course, anyone who’s seen the episode “Pressure” (“Sex was something people just had. Like a cold. Or a Rottweiler.”) knows that it deserves a “Shades of My So-Called Life.”
June 30, 2009 at 1:33 pm
I read this over a year ago and what stuck with me were Megan McCafferty’s essay and Meg Cabot’s essay on Blubber (such a difficult one to talk about)
July 21, 2009 at 11:34 am
[...] (And yes, the inclusion of the “Sigh.” is an example of what I was saying about this book, about being startled by what strikes me as the sloppiness of the writing. [...]
August 4, 2009 at 2:13 pm
I’m reading this now, and yeah…it’s pretty cheesy. Some of them are kind of fun but they’re all so similar, and…eh. I wish this book had been better.
August 4, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Right? I feel like it SHOULD have been better. Like DEAR ANGELA. So much potential! And yet…
I wonder if it’s partly because the process of choosing writers is very political (“this person’s represented by my agent, and that one…”)? I mean, maybe you just don’t get a very high quality of submission with projects like this. But I find that surprising. Like I said, my MSCL listserv used to kick around way better analysis of the show back in the day, and we could’ve put together more interesting personal essays, too (heck, that listserv sparked eight marriages!).
August 10, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Finally got around to reading it.
Wow, Guilty’s House just made me cringe for the writer. Ugh. It reads like a neo con’s parody of what guilty white liberals are like.
In all, I think I was a bit disappointed. It was okay but not GREAT. I did like the one about Deenie where the author was all, “Yeah, I WAS the creeping crud” which I liked because who secretly didn’t kind of gloat that the pretty girl got what was coming to her?
August 10, 2009 at 3:09 pm
You know, that one was the one I’ve been meaning to blog about! Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow so I can finally return that damn book.
August 10, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Ha, yes! Please do.
I’m returning my copy tonight. I’m still disappointed that I didn’t tear through it as fast as I hoped I would.