Why Women Never Stop Coming of Age

When the writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret as a fourth grader, she felt an overwhelming sense of relief. The Judy Blume novel’s 11-year-old protagonist helped clarify her own confusing emotions. Like Craig, Margaret worried about her flat chest, felt her parents couldn’t solve every problem, and asked existential questions to try to make sense of her anxieties. Craig found comfort in Margaret’s tale of moving with her family to the New Jersey suburbs, questioning her faith, and, yes, preparing for her period to arrive—a coming-of-age story that has resonated with millions of other young women since Blume’s beloved book hit shelves in 1970.

A few decades later, Craig had a significantly different response to the novel as an adult. She’d been rereading Blume’s books with an eye toward potentially adapting her work; when she reached the end of , she bawled. In the final chapter, Margaret gets her first period and tells her mother; together, they laugh and cry, and Margaret,” she recalled. “ I swear, I walked around for three days trying to articulate it.” Finally, she had an epiphany: Margaret’s words reminded Craig more of her present-day reality than of her fourth-grade self. Her concerns—how she’s doing as a mother, whether she’s succeeding as a filmmaker—may be more grown-up now, but that same innocent need for guidance, spiritual or otherwise, persists. “I feel like that question mark,” Craig explained, “has never gone away.”