Read Online Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume by Jennifer OConnell - Free Book Online Page A

some women, the journey is more important than the end result, and therefore their companions become like family to them. For others, their companions are ditchable the moment a good-looking End Result appears.
    I believe the enormous success of shows like Sex and the City, as well as the chick-lit publishing phenomenon, can be explained by the vast thirst women have to see or read stories that explore these relationships in their various forms. Our lives are made up of networks of women, stretching from the female relatives who initially shape us to the female friends who make us and break us, sometimes, as in the seventh grade, all at the same time.
    Everyone knows what the courting stage feels like. You get so excited when you meet. The two of you can talk about anything and everything. You can’t wait until the next time you get together, because you feel as if you could keep talking forever. You feel dizzy and a little bit giddy from the new intimacy and the laughter. The excited shock of recognition—the way you see yourself in a new person and how, through her, you see the world through new eyes.
    Finding a new best friend is like falling in love.
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    T. wasn’t the first friend I had, nor the first I lost. I wish I knew how it happens that some friends you make you just can’t keep: They are everything to you for a time, and then, suddenly and without warning, they are not. Meanwhile, though I am surrounded by the friends I’ve kept (and who’ve kept me), it doesn’t seem to be anything more than luck that they’ve stayed around. Luck and work on both our parts, that is. These friends stretch back across the years and hail from almost every place I’ve lived or job I’ve had. Women I met along the way who I’ve had the pleasure to share this journey with.
    Because becoming a woman, it turns out, is every bit as difficult as you imagine it must be when you’re trapped in that awful sex-segregated classroom in the sixth grade, watching a movie you but dimly comprehend and being forced to pass around sanitary napkins.
    (Note to schools: Please stop doing this. It’s traumatizing. No one—but no one—has a pleasant memory of the Period Presentation.)
    I was out recently with friends when the subject of making new friends came up. My friend’s significant other was finding it hard, he said, to find people she liked in her new city. He expected that when her new job started, it would get easier, but said that what his girlfriend really needed was girlfriends of her own.
    All the women at the table nodded sagely.
    I imagined all the women I’d known across the years. The girls I’d admired, who’d made me laugh and then giggle, who’d been comrades in arms in the social battlefields of high school and college, who’d been welcome relief from the dreariness of corporate life, all of whom I’d liked at some point, some of whom I’d loved, others I’d ended up hating, still others who hated me. Of them all, I’d kept just a select few. It wasn’t easy to get to know another woman, to figure out if she was like you. To see if she’d become a sister.
    Which was what I thought we were all looking for. Sisters, not girlfriends. Family.
    But:
    Women are tough, we said, smiling at one another. It’s always a battle to find good female friends.
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    In Just As Long As We’re Together, Stephanie and Rachel’s friendship is tested and ultimately changed by the arrival of Alison, the new girl in town. Stephanie and Alison become fast friends, leaving Rachel out in the cold—or so it feels to Rachel. Rachel and Stephanie fight about all manner of other things in the course of the novel, only coming to terms with what was really going on in the final pages:
    Halfway there I said, “You want to talk about it?”
    â€œDo you?” she asked.
    â€œI don’t even remember how it