Three Answers: Jennifer O'Connell

by Dick Donahue, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 5/7/2007

Three Answers today are from Jennifer O'Connell, editor of Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, coming next month from Pocket Books

PW: What's this book about, and where did the idea came from?

JO: It's an anthology, sort of an homage to Judy Blume, where contemporary female authors wrote about how Judy Blume affected them growing up and how that informed their life later on—not just as writers, particularly not as writers, but really just as girls growing up and the women that they became. I write both adult books for women and teen fiction for girls, so this idea came when, after I started writing my first teen book, it occurred to me that so many of the issues you write about in both genres are so similar—it's like the grown-up version of it—and I started to think of how what you read as a child affects you even as an adult, and I immediately thought of Judy Blume.

PW: What are "Judy Blume moments"?

JO: That's from my essay: the idea that every time I thought about how I associated with Judy Blume, they weren't like these big pivotal moments, they were just like really stupid things—a nightgown I owned, or watching my mother put on makeup as a kid. They're moments that, when they're happening, you don't really recognize how significant they are, and it's only afterwards that you realize that those were the things that make you the person you become.

PW: Do you think that girls who are reading Judy Blume's books are influenced in the same way today that girls were, say, 20 years ago?

JO: When I went back and read the books—a title like Forever, that was considered so risqué at the time, but compared to today's standards it was so tame. So I do wonder, when a girl today reads a Judy Blume book, if it has the same impact, because I think girls at a much younger age are a lot more mature now than perhaps they were 20 years ago. It's all still relevant, though. I read Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great to my nine-year-old daughter, and she loved it. It's interesting how they've updated it: what used to be a record player is now a CD player. Just updating references like that made it a completely contemporary story, because it deals with timeless issues.