DIVINE COMEDY
ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET Pre-teen classic hits the big screen.
Of all Judy Blume’s acclaimed novels, her 1970 classic Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is perhaps her most beloved. The book follows an 11-year-old girl’s struggles with religious identity and a move to the suburbs while desperately longing to grow breasts and start her period. The book’s frank depiction of pre-teen desire made it one of America’s most frequently banned books, and Time magazine credited it with turning ‘millions of pre-teens into readers’.
Part of Margaret’s enduring popularity is because (save the difficulty of hooking old-school sanitary towels onto belts) so many of her problems endured. Writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen) tells Teasers, ‘I read it in the 90s, and I can still remember how it made me feel. It felt so much about me; I was a late bloomer like Margaret. I had no clue it wasn’t contemporary.’
Though the book never felt specific to 1970, the film doesn’t transpose the story to the present and have Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) contend with social media as well as social anxiety. The director had ‘zero desire to modernise it’. The 70s can be felt in the haircuts and hallways of Margaret’s idyllic suburbia but ‘the goal was to have one room that feels like it’s 1970, but
another could be 1960 or 1990. I wanted this universal nostalgia, so everybody felt it spoke to their childhood.’
Benny Safdie and Rachel McAdams play Margaret’s interfaith parents. The latter famously played a teenager in Mean Girls at 26. But rather than rely on the classic Hollywood technique of casting 20-somethings in coming-ofage tales, Fremon Craig found actors around the characters’ actual ages and tasked them with performing the honest realities of young womanhood.
‘There are moments that are delicate,’ she admits when talking about directing her young cast. ‘Like Abby is being measured for a bra or putting a maxi pad in her underwear. But there was such laughter and throwing off of shame. By talking about and performing it, it dissolved the taboo.’
For those who found reading Blume in their formative years like ‘having a very intimate conversation with a friend where they were spilling all the juicy details’, seeing Margaret and her friends on screen pumping their arms and chanting, ‘We must increase our bust!’ feels like reconnecting with a much-loved childhood pal. But even for newcomers, and regardless of age or gender, there’s nothing quite like remembering how exciting the prospect of your first kiss once was. Only now, as Fremon Craig laughs, ‘You can look back and have more compassion for your little dorky, awkward self!’
‘There was such laughter and throwing off of shame’ KELLY FREMON CRAIG