![]() ![]() Let’s see how he liked the stares and the pity. Let’s see him walk out of the locker room wearing that skeletal robo-tech over his bathing suit. When my doctor told me I could swim in it I laughed in his face. My body was so deeply buried beneath the plastic that my own flesh and blood no longer seemed real. The brace taught me I could endure anything with a smile and a fake confident attitude, and it probably prevented my scoliosis from worsening to the point where I needed surgery. Certainly a universal and important topic to address, but for me this was heresy. This, really, is the main theme of the book - how parents project their own needs on their children, and how destructive that can be. It destroys her domineering mother’s stereotypes of her as “the beautiful one.” Because of the brace, Deenie figures out who she is outside of her parent’s crushing expectations. In Blume’s story, the brace sets Deenie free. In addition, I resented the role the brace played in Deenie’s life. The process of getting fitted and accustomed to the brace is excruciating for Deenie, and reading about it was painful for me. When Deenie is diagnosed with scoliosis and gets a Milwaukee back brace, (a far more severe version than the one I wore, with an appliance that comes up under her chin), her mother’s plans for her are shattered. The main character is a beautiful seventh grader whose mother is pushing her to become a model. When I finally read Deenie, a year or so into my regimen, the book made me angry. I became very good at turning men into friends instead of boyfriends. A boy or two may very well have been willing, but I could not believe it. Even then I knew I wouldn’t date as long as I wore the brace. Later, when we played Truth or Dare, the boy I liked kissed my elbow on a dare. I figured that if I joked about my situation in what appeared to be an upfront, healthy fashion, my friends would leave me alone. You can’t really see it under my clothes, but…” And I rapped my knuckles on the plastic over my stomach, the way you knock on a door. I came out wearing a baggy dress with no waist, and said, “You guys should know I have to start wearing this back brace. The boy I liked was there, and I figured I’d better get out ahead of the situation so he’d know what was up. On my 14th birthday, as I was beginning to increase the hours I wore the brace each day, my friends and I went to the beach, then retired to my friend Diane’s house. ![]() ![]() I decided that my situation wasn’t complex, weird, or awkward. I managed my feelings about the brace with the ultimate anti-Blume strategy: denial. I could’ve told Judy Blume a thing or two about what it’s like to go through the most awkward years of your life covered in hard plastic and metal from armpits to thigh. I lived through it 23 hours a day for three years. A few well-meaning people recommended it, but I argued that I didn’t need to read about the pain, humiliation and inconvenience of wearing a brace. So it should resonate as a surprise that, when I got my back brace at age 14, I avoided reading Deenie, Judy Blume’s seminal book on the subject. Pre-teen life was complicated and weird, but by addressing it so straightforwardly, Blume made it feel a bit more manageable. Blume’s clear, unselfconscious prose made it seem normal to think about sex, to ask questions about religion, to worry whether your boobs were big enough. Judy Blume was interwoven with my tween years as much as slam books, homework, and awkward flirtation with boys. By eighth grade, I’d giggled over the sex scenes of Foreverwith my friends so many times the little paperback book fell open automatically to those passages. I pored over Are you There God? It’s Me Margaret several times in sixth grade. Judy Blume Was Right: On Reading Deenie TwiceĮVEN BEFORE I OFFICIALLY hit adolescence I’d read and loved most of Judy Blume’s books. A roundtable discussion about Judy Blume featuring Nell Beram, Nina Berry and Andrea Kleine. ![]()
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