Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is one of Judy Blume's best-loved books

The author said she had always been motivated by her own experiences in capturing that cust of teen-to-adulthood development, especially in her 1970 book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, which echoes a million girls' driving desire to start growing breasts and begin their periods.

"There's a lot of me in Margaret," she said. "I talked to my own private God the way Margaret does. I would plead, 'Just let me be normal', which meant let me have my period, give me some breasts, and hurry up ... You know, the 50s, the body image for women was round and curvy, and I was this skinny little thing, very small, and I wanted to be round and curvy the way round and curvy women today want to be skinny things."

Blume added that she had been inspired to write 1975's Forever after her daughter Randy became disheartened by the lack of normal teen sex scenes in fiction - of the kind where the girl doesn't end up somehow damaged or punished.

"She was reading all these books, where a girl succumbed [to sex], she would be punished, sometimes she would die.," Blume said. "And Randy said, 'Couldn't there ever be a book where two nice kids do it and nobody has to die?' And I thought 'Yes, I need to write this.'"

She added that some parents were bound to react with alarm after their children read her books, as youngsters are generally drawn to reading about what they aren't quite ready to understand.

So "kids will actually go to Mom or Dad and say 'What does this mean?', which is the perfect time to talk to them about it. But that's when sometimes parents get hysterical. Really. It's like, 'Argh, I don't want to talk to you about this, let's get rid of this book, I don't ever want to talk to you about this, I don't ever want you to go through puberty.'"

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