Remarks by Corinne Demas, Professor
of English,
at the Mount Holyoke College dinner honoring honorary degree recipients,
May 24, 2003.
I’m on sabbatical leave from Mount Holyoke
this year and ordinarily wouldn’t be here on campus for commencement, but
the opportunity to meet Judy Blume was too strong a draw. I can’t think of
any commencement speaker, or honorary degree recipient we’ve had in the twenty-two
years I’ve been teaching here who has had a greater direct impact on the lives
of my students. In fact I can’t think of any other individual who has helped
so many young people navigate the difficult waters from childhood to adulthood.
I first learned about Judy Blume about thirty
years ago, at a dinner party with a group of English department academics.
I was introduced to the host’s twelve-year-old daughter, Ellen, who was clutching
a book. She wasn’t just holding this book, she was clutching it tightly against
her chest.
“What are you reading?” I asked her.
“ Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” she
said, and very reluctantly loosened her grip and turned the book so I could
read this most unusual title and see the name of the author, Judy Blume.
“Ellen just got her period,” her mother whispered
to me later. “She’s read that book a hundred times. All the girls in her class
are reading it.”
I was, naturally, curious, about this book,
and when I read it, myself, I wished it had been around when I was twelve.
Judy Blume’s Margaret is a perfectly realized first person narrator, whose
voice is so credible and so intimate, even the loneliest pre-teen reader feels
as if she’s acquired a friend—a friend who is not only brave enough to talk
about the kinds of things young people’s literature had managed to avoid mentioning
entirely for generations (heroines were indisposed and rested on sofas, but
you were never told why), but who dares to ask the most enormous question
“Are you there, God?” and put it in the same paragraph with a reference to
a mundane concern, like moving to New Jersey.
Though I missed out on Judy Blume when I was
a child, fortunately she was there for my students, and for my own children.
Last week I went back through their bookshelves and re-read some of their
favorites—starting with Are You There, God, its Me, Margaret? --this well-worn
copy that was read by my son, now thirty-one, passed on to my daughter, and
which circulated through a dozen grateful readers in-between. I re-read The
Pain and the Great One, an insightful picture book that tells the same story
from two entirely different points of view—two siblings who each believe their
parents love the other one best, and Freckle Juice, which gets to the heart
of every kid’s desire to change the way he looks, Superfudge, the delightful
sequel to Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing—and her best-selling adult novel,
Summer Sisters, which my daughter, who is now eighteen and had been reared
on Judy Blume books, couldn’t put down. In all of these I found myself marveling
at the economy and clarity of prose, the energy of the dialogue, the humor,
the resonance of the theme, and the way these books are so right on target
about emotional truths, without ever being sentimental.
Academics read lots of books, but most of us
don’t clutch them anymore. The books we read and teach and study are books
we admire, books we may be inspired by—but rarely do we feel that tremendous,
almost visceral connection to them, as we did with certain books of our childhood.
Here at Mount Holyoke the students in my English classes encounter the works
of literature that, I hope, influence how they view the world, but long before
they arrived here, it was Judy Blume who helped shape them into the people
that they are.
Judy, thank you.