Within the balmy cradle of a perfect late spring evening in New England, I decided to shock and mortify literary icon Judy Blume. At an event celebrating the release of her 2015 novel In The Unlikely Event, I exchanged muttered apologies with other women in glasses as we bumped our way through a crowded chapel in three step stops and starts. Lining up for anything, let alone an autograph, violates my principles. I don’t want my picture taken with a stranger who’s been press-ganged or cash-coddled into cooperation. When there is a famous person in the restaurant I avert my gaze and calmly tell the appropriate group chats. But Judy Blume is different. To offer anything less than the most squirming vulnerability would be an offense to all she’d given me.
When I pushed my crisp hardcover across the table toward Blume we smiled and said hellos as she added her signature to the title page. The moment was passing. I could feel it falling away. Soon I would be outside again. There was only this last chance. The book came back into my hands and an aide waved me along. “I read Summer Sisters when I was nine,” I said then, and the real life Judy Blume, this marvelous woman, graceful and fun, curly haired and cheerful in a dark blue blouse, stared at me wide-eyed before laughing aloud and conscripting her entire body into one large shrug. I stammered to add, “I’ve read it many times since. I think it’s wonderful. Thank you.” Generously, Blume said, “Well, I suppose we take from stories what we’re ready for. At nine… The friendship, of course.” I nodded, cardboard book body tight to sternum, muscles flickering. Near to floating. “Yes, friendship. Of course.” I answered, backing away. And I had not just lied to Judy Blume. Not exactly.
Blume’s surprise at my admission made sense. Unlike any of her many wonderful, immensely nine-year-old-appropriate works– Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself was always my favorite, but I also take every opportunity to evangelize for the tender and charming 2023 film adaptation of her puberty blockbuster Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, which includes a Rachel McAdams performance I often accidentally raise my voice about at parties– Summer Sisters features simulated sex, real sex, proto-scissoring, abortion, AIDS, girls counting each other’s pubic hairs, more sex, triangulation of desire between two women and this one kind of dull guy, suffering, joy, decimated nuclear families, horny flamenco dances, absolutely tons of hitchhiking, and death. It’s fantastic for fizzy yearners of all ages. A book about growing up that I feel lucky to have grown with.
Having swiped my mother’s mass market paperback from her bedside, I read it while our babysitter smoked weed with her boyfriend outside. I was never a very cloistered child; Mom and I saw Titanic on my sixth birthday. There was no prescribed bedtime in the home and Maury and Jerry Springer were consistent sites of after school fascination. But Summer Sisters represented the opening of a door. This story about loving someone so much you almost hate them was so romantic to me as a shy and stocky know-it-all, the turmoil thrilling and enviable. Time and age, romances and ruptures, and wads of wisdom collected in corners like notes on receipt backs have disabused me of this notion only in part and on my best days. I remain weak for the tragic poetry of earliest tangles, prone to romanticising the idea of friendships which threaten to blossom into more, drawn to the eerie funhouse reflections of the self that mirror back in closest girlhood friends. Naturally, I would not have said, as a fourth grader, that I was savoring homoerotic subtext in this frothy piece of popular fiction. I’d have said, did say, merely, well, please close the door. I need to take a look at this again.
Released in 1998, the book follows Victoria ‘Vix’ Leonard and her mercurial best friend Caitlin Somers from tweendom in the late ‘70s through college and early adulthood. Vix is the eldest child of tired and disappointed parents in Santa Fe. When the pretty, troublemaking new girl in school invites Vix to spend the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, the laws of her stern, desert world are stretched like coiled muscles under hot hands. Having been chosen by Caitlin feels to Vix like a miracle, an anointment. This, of course, is not an especially complicated or novel premise. Reserved, dark-haired Vix is smitten with loudmouth Caitlin, an underparented blonde who has a complicated relationship to the truth. Right. In turn, Caitlin finds serious Vix, who had never been on a plane, had never seen the ocean, a curiosity. Sure, we get it. But, god, it works. This first summer becomes another, which quickly becomes five, six. Two very different girls become one inseparable duo, braiding the contrasting pieces of themselves together forever, for a while.
When I was knock-kneed, puppydog in love with a college friend, I loaned her Summer Sisters. This did not work, in the sense of making her any less straight, that is, but I was undeterred. I accepted advances from her boyfriend’s roommate and continued waiting for real life to begin. That soft, fat book with a white adirondack chair on its cover traveled with me from home to home and Atlantic to Pacific. I have foisted it on so many friends, and reread it myself so often over the spread of so many needful summer days, that the binding has begun to dry up, curl, go loose. Blume’s clean, straight-forward prose – never indulgent, always sincere – still works like an emotional Swiss Army knife, efficiently slicing through the familiar thrum of daily life to reveal the fragile nerve center beneath. When memetic phrases like “girl dinner” and “girl math” or “I’m literally just a girl” clang against my skull like errant gym class volleyballs, Summer Sisters is refreshing in the way it commemorates the intense sensations of girlhood without turning the very idea of being a girl into mystical bullshit which infantilizes women and casts them as inherently less durable figures in the world. While a nostalgic sunkissed hue does color much of the early, teenaged chapters, Blume is clear-eyed about the impermanence of adolescence and all which is gained in leaving it behind.
Summer Sisters is not “about” “lesbians”, though it does kick off with some twelve-year-old mutual masturbation. “Caitlin said they’re not lesbos because they always pretended to be doing it with a boy. On the other hand, they might be.” The girls dub themselves “Vixen and Cassandra, summer sisters, the two sexiest girls on the Vineyard, maybe anywhere,” and rub their “Power” to jittery, giggly completion. They retire their “game” the following summer, sensing time has pulled them across a boundary into a place where what was innocent play would no longer be, but sex remains prominent in the relationship, now refracted outward onto a pair of local guys. On Vix’s seventeenth birthday, Caitlin kisses her on the mouth, gifts her a white dress, and passes her a joint. The fight which follows this spit-swapping beach party leaves both girls devastated. Later, Caitlin calls Vix from Paris to report that, in a departure from her usual tales of man-eating, she’s having an affair with a woman. “She reminds me of you… Dark hair, full breasts, beautiful skin.” Vix, recalling a series of erotic dreams, admits that one featured Caitlin. When applying to colleges, Vix writes her admissions essay on, “Caitlin Somers, The Most Influential Person in My Life”.
As their Vineyard summers recede, Vix weathers the death of her younger brother, the subsequent total breakdown of her family unit, and a dysfunctional romantic relationship while continuing to work, make friends, and build an adult life for herself. Caitlin defers college indefinitely and commences with trying to outrun something inside herself. Restless need drives her across continents alight with fever, giddy and bragging one moment, inconsolable the next. The pair stay in touch through Caitlin’s enigmatic postcards. – She writes on a photo of Judy Garland, “Are they immortal just because they made movies? No answer required. Just think.”– and the late night phone calls in which she begs Vix to drop everything and meet her in Seattle, London, Buenos Aires.
The novel unfolds in a close third person on Vix which is interspersed occasionally with dispatches from characters. For a page or two, and with varying success, we glimpse the perspectives of parents, siblings, and other friends. The device works because we pointedly never hear from Caitlin. Summer Sisters is Vix’s story and Caitlin’s mind is one place where Vix, for all her efforts, cannot go. Even in adulthood Vix remains so mesmerized by Caitlin, so assured of her personal dynamism – plus the magical power of money to ameliorate life’s woes – that she cannot see how troubled Caitlin truly is, how much of her glittering personality is a calculated performance. The two are locked in a juvenile knot of mutual adoration that disallows either the possibility of understanding the other. For all their affection, their closeness, for as many times as Caitlin disgusted Vix with her unwashed hair and dirty feet, or Vix infuriated Caitlin with her logical mind, her reluctance to break rules, they become to one another an idealized sketch, a memory, a dream.
In the transition into adulthood, and beyond, over and over, as new phases bloom, the world expands. This forward movement, natural and necessary and agonizing, is a foreclosure on the past. People, places, parts of the self become lost, leaving memories which will themselves warp over time. Summer Sisters has become a useful measuring stick by which to gauge how far out the tide has already gone. Every time I revisit the book, I know myself better, have become in some essential but previously opaque way more fully formed. Every time I revisit the book, it is sadder than I remembered, sadder than I understood. The thrill that such fierce friendship brought me when I was a girl lurching toward the cliff’s edge of beginning is tempered by a stinging understanding of goodbyes.
A person can be a talisman. So can a book. And through these sacred bodies, the artifacts of time gone by, we remember who we were, understand who we have become. The coming-of-age novel, after you’ve come of age with it, becomes something stranger, heavy with private meaning. With Summer Sisters, Blume offers a vision of girlhood rich with sticky, sensory truth. It is a love story by all reasonable definitions, a gently schmaltzy ode to memories kept like fireflies in jars. “Vix closed her eyes, breathing in that familiar scent, and for a moment it was as if they’d never been apart. They were still Vixen and Cassandra, summer sisters forever. The rest was a mistake, a crazy joke.” Our past is here and not here, Summer Sisters says, and all the time I am more sure that is true.
