Notes of a disenchanted mom reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Tim started enjoying solo reading when he was about the age Holly is now, whereas she still expects me to read her a bedtime chapter or two every night. As a result, this is my first time through the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series. When Tim was in third grade, he too pored over these wildly popular graphic novels, but he read them to himself, whereas Holly has chosen them for nighttime reading with me this week.

And I have to say, so far I’m not a big fan. Somehow I don’t think author Jeff Kinney will miss me much; he’s spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list in the children’s fiction genre, so to say I’m in the minority is an understatement. Forty million copies of Wimpy Kid books are in print to date, and Kinney produced the feature film based on his series earlier this year.

My problem seems to be that as a reader, I simply can’t accept vapidity in a protagonist. Greg Heffley, the titular character, isn’t just wimpy. He’s whiny, trite, incurious and self-absorbed. No one’s mind is expanding by getting inside of his thoughts. No one is developing a larger frame of reference for the world by learning how he views his universe.

It’s not that I’m such a traditionalist where children’s literature is concerned. I’ve read some terrific new novels with my kids in the past five years or so that I savored just as much as any of the books of my childhood. And I’ve read some that were perfectly decent even if not brilliant.

But my theory about what’s wrong with books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid has to do with the fact that many of these authors were children in the 1970s, just as I was. And middle grade literature went through a significant change around that time, with authors like Judy Blume demonstrating a new kind of realism. These authors provided evidence that protagonists of children’s books could be lifelike rather than exemplary: regular kids, not paragons. It turned out you didn’t have to be as sanguine as Anne of Green Gables, as quirky as Harriet the Spy or as brave as Bonnie and Sylvia in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to be a hero(ine). You could be a real kid, with fears, anxieties, insecurities, and hopes that might seem silly at times.

But I think there’s more to it than just an acknowledgment that real kids fight with their siblings and fear looking foolish on the soccer field. Blume’s characters, and dozens of other protagonists from fine examples of contemporary children’s literature, might have reminded kids of themselves, but they also had one crucial characteristic that the wimpy kid does not. They had introspection. They didn’t just witness the world; they contemplated it with a cerebral depth that lent them a certain degree of bravery. Blume’s characters, for example, pondered spirituality, cultural differences, moral decisions and prejudice. What made them appealing wasn’t just their realism; it was their depth. And depth is what Greg Heffley lacks – even depth as far as personal ambition.

Holly realizes I’m not crazy about this series. She likes it, because the wimpy kid gets to complain all he wants – after all, it’s his narrative -- and that’s exciting to a child who is discouraged from whining. And I do understand the argument that children’s librarians and teachers offer in favor of these books: for some kids, books like this are all that gets them to read anything at all, and something is definitely better than nothing when it comes to kids and reading.

So I shouldn’t be so quick to disparage. I’d rather read about characters who inspire me a little bit, even if they are only nine years old. But Holly should be allowed to judge for herself. And if these are the books that get her to read on her own, then she should indulge as much as she wants. But I won’t be a bit sorry if she sneaks off to read these in private – and saves the headier texts to read with me.

Reading Judy Blume's Blubber 25 years later

I didn’t expect to be writing two blog entries about Judy Blume within two months’ time, but my 7-year-old daughter is on something of a Judy Blume tear, and reading the early chapter books with her has brought up a lot of interesting issues. In my last Judy Blume-related post, I wrote about my surprise in finding out that certain details had been updated in recent printings of the books: kids listen to CDs rather than records and they film with video cameras despite the fact that the book in question was written in the 1970s.

This time it’s the subject matter itself that is inspiring our contemplation. Holly and I have been reading Blubber, a novel published in 1974 for middle readers about what happens when scapegoating in a fifth grade classroom runs amok. At 7, Holly is probably a little younger than the target audience for this book, but I have no objections to her reading it. The characters are pre-pubescent; more importantly, the subject matter is timeless.

Or so I thought. Scapegoating and bullying continue to be hot topics in my children’s classrooms, but I’m finding the theme to be not quite as timeless as I would have expected. What has changed is not the way kids can treat each other – meanly, ganging up, siding with the stronger against the weaker – but the likely results. Over the weekend, we read a chapter in which the “mean girls” ambush and partially strip the scapegoat character, Linda Fischer, whom they dub “Blubber,” in the restroom, and then another chapter in which they destroy her lunch while calling her names. By the end of that chapter, the ringleader is threatening physical abuse, and in the words of the frustratingly passive narrator, Jill, “You could see she wasn’t fooling around anymore.”

I’ve stopped several times while reading to ask Holly for her perceptions on what’s going on. She understands what it means for kids to gang up on each other; she knows about ideas like being left out and being called names, not because it’s happened to her but because unlike in “Blubber”’s era, adults talk about this at her school openly and frequently. While bullying may be a timeless theme, the Judy Blume who wrote the book back in 1974 probably could not have imagined how much adults’ response to it would change. Although in Blubber, it’s apparent that telling a teacher or other adult about the abuse would be futile, Holly knows that at her school any form of meanness is taken seriously by the adults in charge – and unlike in Blubber’s world, the kids talk often about how to avoid behaviors like name-calling and teasing. The idea of pulling down another child’s pants in the restroom is unheard of to them: keeping your hands to yourself is of paramount priority at their school, and what the girls in this book do would be considered sexual harassment by today’s standards.

It’s a relief to think that the previously cloistered world of pre-teen bullying has been rendered generally unacceptable, although it’s hard for me to articulate to Holly the reasons. It’s easier for me to keep repeating “They wouldn’t be allowed to do that today because a teacher would find out and help Linda” than “The administration would intervene not only to protect poor Linda but out of fear that Linda might return to campus with a loaded semi-automatic.” Bullying is simply a dirty word on today’s elementary school campus, for reasons good and not-so-good: because bullying is mean, and because fear has developed around the bullied. Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, argues convincingly that it’s actually a misnomer to refer to the anti-bullying movement as a Columbine issue since in fact his extensive investigative reporting revealed that bullying wasn’t a problem for the Columbine murderers, but even if that was a misrepresentation by the media, it still helped all of us to open up this issue for general discussion in the classroom arena.

And no matter how much anti-bullying instruction we give our kids, there are some ways in which they’ll never get all of it right. My son, who is in fifth grade just like the characters in Blubber, told me proudly that he and his recess buddies have started making an effort to be much nicer to a boy who was often left out because he was clumsy and inept in their playground football games. “Now we pass to him all the time, and when he throws it, we make sure we don’t intercept it so he gets the play and feels like he’s doing really well,” Tim reported. "And we cheer for him." This is great news…sort of. Tim and his friends are doing what they sincerely believe to be a nice thing, and it’s hard for me to point out to him that the boy in question might eventually start to feel patronized.

I wish I knew what happened to Linda “Blubber” Fischer after fifth grade. Maybe she lost weight, became pretty, and no longer had a problem with mean girls. Maybe she stayed fat and pathetic, and the teasing and bullying continued right through high school, in which case I imagine her becoming a woman with low self-esteem and a sad adulthood, possibly subjected to domestic abuse. Or maybe she endured middle school and then went to a progressive private high school like the one I attended, where middle school’s outcasts were celebrated for their differentness.

Aside from the bullying, there’s a minor plot point in Blubber that is also alien to Holly: the protagonist’s mother is shown smoking a cigarette at the kitchen table in one scene, and talks about trying to quit smoking in another. “Back when this was written, it wasn’t all that strange for parents to smoke,” I told Holly. “People knew it was unhealthy, but it wasn’t as unusual as it is now.”

“I saw a man smoking when we were in Boston yesterday,” Holly contested.

“I know, but he was by himself outside. Wouldn’t it seem weird if you were at a friend’s house and the mom was sitting at the table smoking?”

Until we had that discussion, I hadn’t given much thought to how much the idea of smoking in a typical suburban household has changed, but it was interesting to contemplate – and much simpler than the question of how bullying has changed. My kids’ school demonstrates a zero tolerance policy toward pretty much every kind of behavior exhibited in Blubber, and for that I’m grateful. Now it’s just a matter of eradicating the intent behind it, and the way girls still find it possible to gang up, scapegoat, or generally make each other unhappy for no good reason other than that they can.

Do anachronisms matter? The question led me straight to Judy Blume

Although my daughter is 7 and a strong reader, she still loves the nightly ritual of settling down together to hear me read chapter books to her. Recently, she brought home two Judy Blume classics: Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Otherwise Known As Sheila the Great.

“I read these when I was your age!” I exclaimed. The books had new covers with hipper-looking drawings, I noticed, but I was looking forward to re-familiarizing myself with characters of my era, grade-schoolers from the 1970s, just like me.

Therefore, I was puzzled when we reached a scene in which Sheila’s sister plays a CD. I was sure CD players came out when I was in college in the mid-1980s. Later in the same book, a boy at camp uses a video camera. Who messed with my 1970s Judy Blume? I wondered.

And it came up again later, as we moved from Sheila onto Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and the subsequent books in that series. Making up a Christmas list, Peter Hatcher notes that he wants an MP3 player. Another time in the book, he text-messages a friend.

I read Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing when I was in fourth grade, which would have been about 1975. There’s no question that Judy Blume is considered a visionary when it comes to children’s literature, and rightfully so; her uber-realistic novels have enticed millions of children into the practice of reading, and her frank descriptions of family life and rituals related to growing up have provided reassurance about “normalcy” for just as many. But was she actually a technology visionary as well, anticipating MP3 players thirty years before the debut of the iPod?

I asked a couple of children’s librarians if they knew how these changes had come to be, but they weren’t aware of the situation. So I pulled up Judy Blume’s website and wrote to the e-mail address there, hoping that eventually I might receive something along the lines of a stock response from a publicist’s assistant.

To my surprise, and to Judy Blume’s credit, it was the author herself who wrote back to me, with eloquence and detail. Because I don’t have her permission to quote here from our correspondence, I will try to paraphrase it accurately.

As I understood it, her books (with two notable exceptions, neither of which Holly and I have read) are not meant to be read as historical chronicles, like the Little House books; they are supposed to feel contemporary whenever you read them. Therefore, when they go into re-printing, which books as spectacularly popular as hers do frequently, it only makes sense to make updates when appropriate. Moreover, she pointed out that although the first in the “Fudge” series, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, was published in 1972, the subsequent three books in the series were published over the course of the next three decades. The characters age only three years, but the last book was published in 2002. It wouldn’t make sense to implement outdated items like record players or mimeograph machines in books written in the 1990s or 2000s, so instead, the older books get updated to match the newer ones.

Judy Blume also told me about another update she has made. The personal hygiene items Margaret describes in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, first published in 1970, have been changed. Girls reading it today simply wouldn’t have any clue about the belts and pins Margaret locates when she gets her first period.

It’s this last example that resonates the most with me. Two generations of young women have now gotten information about personal events such as menstruation from Judy Blume’s books. If this is to be their most valuable source of information – and in some cases, unfortunate as this may be, it probably is – accuracy matters, and it just makes sense to describe a situation similar to one the girls will actually experience, rather than describing items their grandmothers might have used.

All of these are good explanations, but I’m still a little dubious. My kids have never actually used a cassette player or a telephone with a cord, but they certainly know these things exist, and even if they didn’t, they’re intelligent enough to realize that technology evolves over the years. One of their favorite Sesame Street CDs has a line about “What is round? A cookie! The moon! This record!” My kids never said to me, “This record? What on earth is a record?” So I was put off by the idea that they needed things like CDs and video cameras translated for them.

Furthermore, it seems to me that the whole idea of trying to make editorial changes based on the era of your audience is a bit of a slippery slope. Sure, it makes sense for Margaret to use disposable pads rather than a plastic belt, but aren’t some of the events themselves in Blume’s books sort of outdated? As a parent of an 11-year-old, I would dearly love to be wrong about this, but I’m not so sure than any 12-year-old still gets flustered over the idea of being kissed in the storeroom at a school dance. Moreover, what do we make of Tony Miglione, adolescent hero of Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, who uses binoculars to watch his 16-year-old female neighbor try on sweaters? With Internet porn a click away, what young male is going to care about sweater profiles?

Not to mention the fact that the impossibly disruptive little brother Fudge in Tales of Fourth Grade Nothing would surely be on Ritalin in today’s day and age, and therefore much less likely to carry out the hijinks that follow wherever he goes.

Judy Blume was tremendously gracious in taking the time to respond to me, and it is with appropriate trepidation that I question the editorial decisions of someone who singlehandedly changed the course of teen-and-tween literature. Make no mistake: Judy Blume is adored the world over, and for good reason. It’s still an interesting question, though. Just how much do kids need to relate to a character on a literal level in order to identify with him or her?

My guess is, not very much. Not long ago I heard Lizzie Skurnick interviewed on NPR about her new book, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. She described being at a school in West Africa when the female students asked her the title of the book she was holding. It was none other than Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. The speaker had a moment of panic, worrying that the students would ask her what the book was about and she would have to describe this tale of suburban New Jersey pre-teen 1970s angst to a group of girls raised in the African bush.

She need not have feared. “I love that book!”came the unanimous cry from the audience. They’d already read it. They understood it. And they loved it.

No translations or updates necessary, apparently.