God to Margaret: Always with wings!

But part of what has kept Blume in the teenage canon for so long has been her ability to stuff a health textbook's worth of information about the mechanics of teenage bodies into 200-page stories full of enough emotional Sturm und Drang to not make kids feel as if they're sitting through one of those hellish single-sex P.E. classes. (Note: I support hellish single-sex P.E. classes, as well as good sex education in every form available in every context, and wish that every kid in this country were provided with a copy of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" on his or her 12th birthday. Still, reading "Forever" is way more fun.) Even in a progressive home, raised by parents who were nothing if not open about sexuality and the human body, I found myself educated by Blume; the memory of learning what an erection was from "Then Again, Maybe I Won't" is burned vividly in my brain.

Feminist historians Kathleen O'Grady and Paula Wansbrough, editors of the anthology "Sweet Secrets: Stories of Menstruation," have credited Blume with changing the attitudes of an entire generation of girls about getting their periods. "Are You There God?" is mentioned in "The Curse: Confronting the Last Unmentionable Taboo, Menstruation" and in "The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation." The people at "Our Bodies, Ourselves" recommend the book as a resource; Blume reads from "Are You There God?" in the seminal menses movie "Under Wraps"; and there are a number of references to Blume's book at the online Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health.

In short, "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" remains the ur-text for those on the verge of menstroo-ation, and thereby carries a heavy burden, especially in these days of crappified sex ed, ever-increasing restrictions on women's reproductive health choices, and mixed messages about youthful sexuality and development. Perhaps it is better -- safer -- to make sure that everything "Are You There God?" tells those girls is as accurate as possible. If it's the only thing a preteen sensation is going to read about her own impending menarche, then better that it not send her on a dizzying, fruitless search for some kind of medieval pink belt with hooks.

And yet...

This kind of change, a total of perhaps five sentences spread among three scenes, raises a larger question about the way we regard our books. Because while this is an update that was made years ago, it fits in perfectly with a contemporary attitude about our narratives: that they increasingly seem to serve not simply as stories unto themselves, but as instructional manuals. Isn't that, after all, what happened to James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" when Oprah picked it for her book club and turned it from a "memoir" into a self-help survival guide for addicts?

Isn't that the point that many Salon readers made just last week when they complained that Elizabeth Gilbert's spiritual/travel memoir "Eat, Pray, Love," reviewed by Lori Leibovich, was irrelevant to them because they didn't share Gilbert's economic class and the opportunities it afforded. On one level, that's a valid point. Few people can afford to travel to three different continents in a year, so Gilbert's globetrotting tale of emergence from depression does not provide a model that could be emulated by many. But in the past, the power of a story to chronicle an experience unavailable to many readers has often been considered a plus.

Likewise, a book that retails a historical experience now alien to modern readers has fallen into its own worthwhile category: educational. Young women today have no experience with sanitary belts. They likely never will. Born in 1975, I would never have known that such a thing existed had it not been for reading about it in "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret." And while it may seem minor -- so very minor, such a few small sentences in a 150-page book that's just as much about God and making your boobs grow as it is about periods -- I'm actually glad for the sense it gave me that as recently as five years before I was born, girls had very different hassles during puberty. I'm glad I know a bit about what they were. I'm glad that other young women know about some of the technology they can be grateful for (wings!) even if they, like me and many others, don't share Margaret's undiluted enthusiasm for the onset of monthly bleeding.

And speaking of Margaret, it makes me a little sad to think that girls (and boys) who get to know her now don't know that she had to pick the color of her belt and learn how to operate it. It seems to me as fundamental a part of the book as the suburban house in which she grew up, the Mice Men record album she got from the Pre-Teen Sensations for her birthday, and the big curlers her mother used to set her hair the night before Norman Fishbein's dinner party for the whole class. Go back and read Margaret again. Admire the cultural stereotyping of the Fishbein house, the fashion choices of poor, sweet early ripener Laura Danker and lawn-mowing hottie Moose Freed. See if you don't feel the late '60s vibrating psychedelically from every sentence, even in the newer editions.

It's hard to imagine, but while we've been busy growing up, "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" has become a historical novel, one that gives its readers more than just a mirror held up to their own specific conditions. It offers them the thrill of seeing themselves, even in characters who live in different times, in different worlds. That stupid pink belt is as fundamental as Laura Ingalls Wilder's corncob doll Susan, or the junk that Francie and Neeley Nolan exchange for pennies. The miniature that Jane Eyre draws of Blanche Ingram to remind herself of her comparative worthlessness is heartbreakingly familiar, even though today, upon hearing of her rival's beauty from Mrs. Fairfax, Jane probably would have just looked her up on MySpace.

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