You know what I didn't remember about Deenie? Her mum is repulsive. She's shallow and she's stupid and she has labelled one of her daughter's 'the smart one' and the other 'the pretty one' and she parents with different expectations and rules accordingly. She also doesn't drive and relies on this 'Aunty Rae' character, who is equally shallow and stupid (and clearly a loser who just hangs around 'Ma' wanting to do things for her) to drive herself and her daughter's to the department store for purple turtlenecks. Do relationships like Aunty Rae and Ma's still exist as innocently as Judy Blume writes it, or if the Deenie story continued past Janet's party, would we soon discover Aunty Rae's single white female tendencies and/or lesbian attraction to Ma? Parallels can perhaps be drawn between Aunty Rae and 'Susan Minton', the girl who hangs around Deenie in 'formroom' and wears the same clothes as Deenie and gets her hair cut the same way (even after Deenie's mad scene... which is SO crazy... when she hacks off her beautiful long hair the night she comes home with her 'Milwaukee Brace').
And here's a thought. Back in the day, and even earlier today when I was reading it, I relied on Deenie/Judy Blume's words to describe a Milwaukee Brace for me... and I think I imagined it pretty well. But look now! We have internets! I will pause now to google 'Milwaukee Brace' and I will attach a link for you too.
(creates new tab... googles 'Milwaukee Bracd' by mistake but Google knows what she meant, reveals that there was a trashy telemovie starring the mum from Home Improvement with what looks like the same plot as Deenie as well also a gory black and white photo of said brace amongst the image results)
What a horrifying contraption! As the girl in the telemovie said, 'you may as well just tattoo 'freak' on [their] forehead'. But what I can see from the pictures is that Buddy Brader would have had no problem copping a feel at the seventh grade mixer when he coerced Deenie into leaving the gym with him for the dark quiet of the locker room. While I gained immense satisfaction reading this part of the book as her little teenaged heart flipped at the requited encounter with her love interest, I was terribly sad that the one thing I thought I remembered clear as crystal about this book was actually wrong. I had rewritten this scene in my head so that a) it happened at Janet's party and b) they were in a closet and c) they were cheered into that closet like happens at so many of those parties in so many of these books. I guess I will just have to comfort myself with the fact that I at least remembered that this book was about a pretty girl who had to wear a back brace.
A few general notes before I leave this book and move onto the next (Sally J Freedman next, methinks): the writing is incredibly teenaged, flipping around from one thought to another like a squirrel to a nut. It absolutely flies by (I think maybe two hours cover to cover) and you get Deenie's every little thought, just like listening to a fourteen year old on a bus. Every paragraph deals with a different idea or incident, and just pages from the end when the idea of Janet's party is introduced, an experienced reader suspects that there isn't room on the remaining pages for the two weeks to pass to get us to Janet's party, let alone room for all the goings on at Janet's party... but sure enough, we get there and it gets done. I hate to spoil it for you, but it turns out that Janet's party is less about Deenie trying to pash Buddy than it is about Deenie learning a valuable life lesson, becoming less shallow and being an honest and upstanding daughter of which Frank and Thelma Fenner should be proud.
Also... Deenie does touch her 'special place' a couple of times in the book, but it is just described as making her feel nice and helping her fall asleep. I still argue I might have thought this was just a little over the shoulder self administered back rub, though I can't explain what I could have understood by the scene where Mrs Rappaport discusses 'masturbation' with the girls during gym class.
My eagle eyes also spotted a mistake, which has provided the same satisfaction as seeing a wristwatch in a movie about the Roman empire. Deenie's friend Janet is described as jewish and her dad is a kosher butcher... but in one scene when they are talking in the cafeteria, Janet 'spits out her ham' when Deenie tells her something that surprises her. Shame on you, Judy Blume. The devil is quite literally in the detail.
Final Word: The image above is not the cover of my current copy of Deenie. There are plenty of covers out there, it would seem, and I really hoped I would remember what was on the cover of the much loved family copy of Deenie when looking for the image to match this post... and then I found this page 15 or so of Google Images and I knew it like I know myself.
Have you checked out Fine Lines yet? Have you?
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You could write it yourself.