Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a young adult novel by Judy Blume, published in 1970. It has since received many awards, and appears on the Time Magazine list of best novels since 1923. In the United States it has also featured prominently on lists of books that have been ‘challenged’ which is the term that the American Library Association uses when people make a complaint about a book and ask for it to be taken off library shelves.

So, I had a look, and found a charming, funny novel about eleven year old Margaret Simon who worries that she will never get her period, never develop breasts and will be some kind of freak for the rest of her life. She also frequently talks to God, but struggles to work out which religion she should be identifying with.

I suppose the book does cover familiar young-adult ground in exploring themes of belonging and identity, but it does so in a way that really takes things up a notch, notably through the frequent chats with God. Strangely these passages reminded me of the film Gravity, where stranded astronauts talk to “Houston in the blind’, a term used to refer to radio communications, where astronauts cannot hear Houston, but continue to send messages just in case Houston is receiving. In Gravity there is much interesting enigma about these messages. Do they get through to Houston? Are they similar to prayer where no one seems to be listening? Even if no one listens, do the messages sent to Houston offer comfort and reassurance in themselves, even if no reassurance seems to be literally forthcoming? Is the fact that the audience hears these messages significant?

Margaret’s one-sided God chats have a similar enigmatic quality. They are comforting in themselves even though no apparent reply comes back. And although the blessings Margaret asks for fail to be granted, this turns out to be no bad thing. Big breasts for example. Margaret envies a girl in her class who has been granted such a gift, only to discover, after talking to this apparently fortunate girl, that maybe a blessing can also be a curse. Maybe Margaret’s prayers are answered in the lack of any response.

You see? This is a book that gets you thinking in broad terms, about more than just fitting in with your friends at school.

These are the themes that have had people in America queuing up to demand the book be taken out of libraries. America is a strange country, seeing itself as free-thinking, but actually fundamentalist in many ways. A good novel will show and not tell. There is a constituency in America that prefers the illusory certainty of telling and being told. Showing is always going to be more nuanced than telling, tending to pose questions rather than apparently giving answers.