Are You There, God? Because We Are HERE

Raise your hand if you thought this day might never come. Just me? 

No, I didn’t think so. It’s been at least a couple of years since we heard there would be an adaptation of Judy Blume’s seminal Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and I’m not going to lie, I worried. 

Judy Blume does not get her due. That’s just factual. She was, in the 1980s, seen as the voice of kids, the person who understood teens – but at the risk of sounding like a bad TikTok, none of your favourite YA stories, in any medium, would be here without Judy Blume. 

And she didn’t give up the goods to her most famous story easily, either. Director Kelly Fremont Craig explains to EW: 

"She was very nervous that someone would turn the film into something very glossy and pretty, where all the edges were sanded off," Craig explains of Blume's long-held reticence. "When I sat down with her, she had just seen my first film, The Edge of Seventeen, and she expressed that that made her feel confident that I was going to embrace all the flaws and nuances. That gave her confidence that the film would have the same honesty that she is so known for."

And now, at last, the trailer, starring Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, and Abby Ryder Forson as Margaret: 

SO. 

How do we feel? 

The thing that makes me happiest, I think, is the thing I thought I was going to care least about. It’s resolutely in the 1970s, the girls look like the eleven-year-olds they are, and that includes wearing pinafores to school because that’s what you did. 

The kids look great, in fact. Not too polished, not like professional actors in the least, and authentically obsessed with puberty at a time when – we forget! – there was literally no information available if it wasn’t either school-sanctioned or utterly taboo. 

And the adults? I’ve said that Judy Blume was excited about the casting of Rachel McAdams, and there’s virtually nothing that would not be improved by adding Kathy Bates – but including their scenes together in the trailer reinforces two things we’ve been told about this movie – that it won’t be just for tween girls. These are fully-formed women who inform Margaret’s growing up… it tracks. It feels like a fitting tribute to the generations of women for whom this book was, and is, as close as it gets to an adolescent guidebook. 

Also? This trailer was cut with *extreme care*. There are visual shout-outs to the book all over the place, from Nancy Wheeler’s yellow swimsuit to Margaret’s loafers without socks – in every frame we’re being told this movie was made by people who love this story, for themselves…  i.e., for us. 

I can’t wait. Later we’ll have to worry about how it does at the box office and what various numbers mean, but not today. For now, we just get to be thrilled.