Quoted in a 2018 feature in The Atlantic, written to celebrate TCAKOY’s twentieth anniversary, Dr. Cara Natterson (who served as Schaeffer’s medical consultant on the book for younger girls, and the author of its sequel) says that while she’d love to publish a book about sex under American Girl’s brand name, she feels that there’s a place and a time, and that younger girls may need more “safety” from sexual-health-related information as they grow into teenagers. “Tell everyone I would love to write that book with American Girl, but that’s not what these books were meant to do,” she says, in her interview with The Atlantic. “It’s funny how this one book is sort of a safe reminder of what it was like to go through puberty. There’s something really comfortable about that.”
I can’t help but wonder, as an adult who remembers those first creeping buds of sexuality and objectification, vines unfurling in and around my nine-, ten-, eleven-year-old body, which was commented on and joked about in a sexual way, before I ever reached the age of Dr. Natterson’s target American Girl readership: Whom does this omission keep safe? I know it would have been safer for me to learn about sex from a “cool aunt”—accurate and affirming—than from the boys on the back of the school bus and the jokes on morning radio shows. I know the very young patients who travel thousands of miles to the abortion clinic where I work could have used a basic primer, and instead have often received only misinformation (or worse, silence) about the things that have been done to and are happening within their bodies.
I want to ask Dr. Natterson: “Safe” for whom? But I know that cool aunts can carry their own baggage, their own fears, their own anxiety about the perceptions of the world, of the media, of conservative parents of young readers. Cool aunts can be scared to discuss sex, or feel uncomfortable about sexuality and gender identity, too. In 2023, a thirty-six-year-old version of myself opens the book again.
My life now reads like a list of my eleven-year-old self’s wildest dreams, scrawled in gel pen across the pages of a Lisa Frank padlocked diary: has published a book, has an incredibly kind and funny husband who looks like a movie star, has glamorous and beautiful friends, has an important-feeling career, is a mom. And yet I am inhabiting a body from her darkest nightmares, weighing more than I know, or care to know. Tattoos. Adult acne. Bisexuality, and casual sex, and outfits she would consider slutty or frumpy or both. This is actually the body of our dreams, I tell her now, because it is the body in which all of our dreams have come true. My eleven-year-old self rolls her eyes, glares at my thirty-six-year-old body, and silently calls me fat.
