The Books We Loved Growing Up
From "The Care and Keeping of You" to "Nancy Drew"
Hayley: On Tuesday, my friend Ashley tweeted something that quickly went viral. It was about the Amelia's Notebook series, which I had completely forgotten about until she brought it up. I remember having all of those books and loving them, and also asking my mom to buy me composition notebooks (which, actually, I did not like because they were not spiral bound).
[ID: a two-page spread from inside Amelia’s Notebook, filled with writing and small drawings]
It made me think of another book that is tucked inside of my brain: The Care and Keeping of You. But whereas I can only remember the Amelia's Notebook series in little flashes, the contents of The Care and Keeping of You always come screaming back to me. It is a great book, but also slightly traumatizing to read about how to insert a tampon when you're 9.
What are some of the books that you remember from your youth?
Victoria: I deeply loved Amelia's Notebook! I do remember specific moments from it. In one of them, she draws a picture of her hands with purple nail polish on, and says it looks like her fingers are grapes. They also used to publish shorter two-page versions in American Girl Magazine, and I always remember the one from Y2K. Amelia wondered if the parking meters would all spit out coins. The drawing of that is indelible in my mind.
I remember The Care And Keeping Of You, which was also an American Girl book, being kind of forbidden in my house? Well not forbidden, but I would constantly ask for it and my mom would tell me I wasn't old enough yet. I think by the time I got it, its contents were no longer surprising (though I also remember the tampon page).
Something that's frustrating about a lot of the books I liked as a tween and early teen is I can't remember their names! I used to get my mom to buy me books from Target all the time — so you can believe I read my way through the infamous Clique books — and some of them were very random. I remember reading the first book of a series about girls who went to a performing arts high school and were competing to be part of a girl group. In the novel, one of them accidentally has a Long Island Iced Tea, not knowing it isn't just iced tea. I have searched and searched for this book, and no one ever knows what I'm talking about.
One of the things I find interesting about everything I read before about the age of 16 is that I do have these specific moments or visuals that I feel like I will never forget, like the tampon page and the grape nails and the Long Island Iced Tea. In the last Clique book I read, Claire had her first kiss. She described it as feeling like maple syrup was traveling through her whole body. When I had my first kiss, I remembered that line and thought, "Oh, that was wrong."Books were a way to try to make sense of the adult world that I didn't understand, and when I realized they didn’t actually reflect that world, I felt betrayed.
What were your favorite series?
Hayley: I was definitely a huge Harry Potter nerd and I feverishly re-read those books constantly. When I first started reading chapter books, I was really into The Babysitters Club and Nancy Drew. I also really liked any kind of fantasy novel, like the Eragon and Pendragon series, and then everything by Lloyd Alexander (for some reason this specific cover of The Arkadians is burned into my brain). I read all of the Chronicles of Narnia, but they were all just kind of fine by my (apparently very high) standards at the time. Although it seems like I would be a Redwall girl, I was not.
Then of course, the game changers: The Dear Americas and Royal Diaries. I don't know how many of these I read, or how many times I read them, but I was insatiable. I still own the Cleopatra, Victoria, Isabel, and Marie-Antoinette Royal Diaries. I have these books to thank for my continuing obsession with historical fiction and period dramas. These were kind of the next step up from the American Girl Doll books. My mom made me read all of them before I could get a doll. At the time, the only dolls available were Felicity, Josefina, Kirsten, Addy, Samantha, and Molly. I chose Kirsten.
Your point about having very specific visuals basically implanted into your brain is so good and so true! There was this book called The A-List, that was about a New York girl who ended up going to live with her dad in Beverly Hills. There is a scene where she eats a thing of lemon yogurt for breakfast that tasted extra sour but she just shrugs it off, then goes to some volunteer day at the beach and ends up puking all over the popular girl's shoes. Why has that been in my head for 15 years?
Thinking about all of these books makes me realize how so much of my childhood was spent just constantly reading. I feel like I go through bursts now where I will read five or six books back-to-back, and then stop reading completely for like three months. Obviously this is exacerbated by the pandemic.
Victoria: We, unsurprisingly, have many crossovers. Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince came out the summer before I started eighth grade, and I remember sitting in my room for basically all of August and reading the series over and over again. My mom used to get me Nancy Drew books from BJ's (which is like Costco), and they'd come in packs of six. I also remember my fourth grade teacher's library as full of Babysitter Club books, and I read through almost all of them, but I don't remember a single thing! When the show came out on Netflix this summer, everyone on Twitter was like "I'm a Claudia" and I was like “I swear I read these but I have not a single memory of any of the plot.”
I read one or two Dear America books, and many, many American Girl doll ones (I was a Samantha sun, Molly moon). I remember loving this historical fiction novel, whose name I can’t remember, about a girl who worked as a maid in John Adam's household when the Boston Massacre happened. She was in love with one of the British soldiers, and, of course, John Adams defended him. I thought it was very dramatic and romantic, but I'm also disturbed that this was basically pro-cop propaganda.
I also loved Meg Cabot books, though I never actually read The Princess Diaries? But I ate UP the Mediator series and a lot of the stand-alones (the Mediator series is going to be a Netflix movie! Netflix loves to adapt 2000s YA novels!). I really loved a romance, which is not surprising because I still do!
I feel very nostalgic for a lot of this, but there definitely was a ton of problematic stuff in these books that went unquestioned by me/the adults who published these books. The books I read were overwhelmingly white, the characters were all thin, and I don't remember seeing any LGBTQ people in them at all. I remember that the girls in the Nancy Drew books were weight obsessed, and going into JK Rowling's sins would derail this newsletter completely. The more I think about the pop culture I loved between the ages of like 8 and 18, the more clear it is to me that a lot of it was actively harmful.
Am I being too much of a bummer? Did you read more radical stuff than I did?
Hayley: I don't believe my reading was very radical. I remember reading books like Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (which was written by a white woman) or The Red Scarf Girl, but the fact that I can remember them and point them out as examples kind of proves the point that I wasn't reading a ton of things outside my lived experience. I do remember that every year on MLK Jr. Day my mom made my brother and I read an age-appropriate book about MLK Jr. before we were allowed to go sledding or hang out with our friends.
I also loved Meg Cabot even though I also never read The Princess Diaries. I did read two of her YA romance novels, Nicola and the Viscount and Victoria and the Rogue. I was obsessed with them. I was obsessed with any love story of any kind from age 12 to I'd say oh, 31.
A lot of what I consumed growing up was really problematic, no question. I was also a very fast reader and good student so teachers kept suggesting books to me that were above my grade level. Which, fine, but also thematically I was overwhelmed on more than one occasion. The most innocuous example is reading Little Women at an age when I knew how to use context clues but was still missing a lot of vocabulary. Marmie talks about how everyone has their burdens to carry and I thought a burden was an old-timey word for backpack for a long time.
I remember just going to the library and picking up any book that I thought looked cool. I'm much pickier now. And I read way less fiction now, too.
Victoria: I vastly prefer fiction. I will read a memoir or a nonfiction book (and they have dominated my quarantine reads) but I'd much rather get lost in something fake.
I stopped reading Little Women as a kid when I realized Laurie and Jo didn't end up together! I remember feeling deeply betrayed by this, so I'm glad that some things never change.
One thing I've had to unlearn from when I was a kid is the idea of reading itself as virtuous. The fact that I was a kid who read a lot was lauded by my teachers and my parents, and there were lots of incentives to get us to read more (I made my parents order Pizza Hut just so I could get my Book It pan pizza). But reading a book doesn't make me "better" or more intellectual than someone who doesn't. Listening to an audiobook is not "worse" than holding a paper copy. Reading is just a thing I like to do.
Links Hayley Thinks You Should Click
Coming off of an intense week of discourse around pregnancy, miscarriage, and grief, I donated to ROOTT, a Black-women led reproductive justice organization based out of Ohio that does really incredible work.
Did you know you can custom order specific or hard-to-find pens and pencils? I just bought five of my favorite color flair pen that I couldn’t find anywhere else.
My friend sent me a Birthdate Candle and it’s one of the best-smelling candles I’ve ever had and also a very cool gift! The description of people born on September 26 that’s on the back label is so eerily accurate that I am a little scared of it!
One of the few things that brings me joy anymore is listening to the Blank Check podcast. If you want insanely nerdy deep dives on movies, this is 100% what you’re looking for. I highly recommend the Parent Trap episode. (They actually started as a Star Wars podcast all the way back in 2015 where they watched the prequel trilogy and analyzed 10 minutes of each movie in a single podcast episode.)
Stuff That Victoria Recommends With Her Whole Heart
This essay about the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy as a treatise on grief and love and loss and revolution was absolutely incredible.
Friend of the newsletter Carrie Wittmer watched the sex scenes of 30 Hollywood hunks to figure out who has the most on-screen sex and what that says about America right now! It is very funny and insightful.
Last week, I watched half of the classic Bollywood film Lagaan with my friend (it is almost four hours long). A lot of the plot has to do with cricket, which I knew nothing about, so I watched this short documentary on Youtube about it and I am now ready to be a cricket fan.
Two podcasts I’ve been enjoying right now: Unfinished: Short Creek, about the FLDS community in Utah/Arizona and Warren Jeffs, and Trump Inc., which is an open investigation into how the president and his associates are profiting off the presidency.
Gold-Plated Girls comes out twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays! Don’t forget to check out Victoria’s Tuesday essay, “I’m A Gamer Girl Now.”
Royal Diaries!!! Cleopatra was my absolute favorite!
Roald Dahl's books were my favorite as a kid. I was a junior in HS when Sorcerer's Stone was published and missed the hubbub of the first few because I was reading play anthologies all through college. To this day I've never read a single Potter book.