Written By: Catherine Casey
My childhood is more easily remembered in books than in tangible memories — perhaps a side effect of a young mind addled with undiagnosed attention deficit disorder, or maybe just because that’s what you did when you were a child who was often alone. A house with just a small, horrible girl and a tired, trying-her-best mom did not lead to much else but reading between commercials on the Cartoon Network and on car rides with mom to the work buildings she would have to sneak me into because it was too early for me to be dropped off at school.
But there is one memory I have kept, coming to me randomly walking down Glenbrook Road or rounding the tight corners in my tiny apartment. I am seven, maybe eight, and I have taken a break from magic and wizards and boys with scars to read something else. I am still sweaty from a gymnastics lesson, and my leotard is digging painfully into the chub of my arm. Perhaps I am nine, maybe ten, because that’s when I was first thrust into painful puberty overnight and was aware of my body, and how (too) much of it there was, to remember the fat of my little girl arms. I am waiting for my mother on the steps outside the gym, in a small room that held trophies I would never win, leotards I would never have the money to buy, and a giant, unexplained poster for the 2001 film Josie and the Pussycats that I would have, as I would take it when they were throwing it away.
In my hands is Meg Cabot’s first Princess Diaries book, and I am reading about the ever-present tattooed eyeliner on Grandmere’s face and the triangular yield sign shape to Mia’s dishwater blonde hair.
When we think of the pioneers of teenage girl literature, names like Judy Blume and Jane Austen come to mind. I think that perhaps even Go Ask Alice and Little Women would be on the tips of tongues before Meg Cabot. But there is no other person I can recall to characterize the adolescent experience of the early 2000s from my local library’s shelves than her.
In a time before e-readers and easily accessible pdf sharing websites, I remember the jumbled collection of mismatched Princess Diaries books — we had one and two, but no three, four, but we were missing five through eight — though we had all the novellas without context. It became a challenge in itself just to track down her books. I would rely on the lists in the back of copies I’d already found to know what titles I should be looking for because I did not yet have a computer in my back pocket that could do it for me. Various Princess Diaries I found on the bulky desktop catalog older than I was in the corner of the public library, fourth in line for my chance to read what happens after Mia dances with Michael at the Snowflake Dance. All American Girl I found at a charity shop, recognizing the author’s name on the cover and not knowing then it would be the book I most frequently reread in my middle school years. Teen Idol and How to be Popular were both in the library too, though it was not mine but my grandmother’s — one that I did not know the layout of with an intimacy that would lead to me now, seven years since I’ve moved away from that local public library, still being able to recall where everything in that building was and probably still is.
Perhaps what keeps Meg Cabot’s voice ringing in my mind whenever I read something obviously written for tween and teen girls, is the seriousness that she grants such an audience. Mia and Sam and Jess and Steph and Ally and all the other girls who serve as Cabotian (a new phrase I’m claiming, right here right now) protagonists never feel pedantic or preachy or condescending. There is no formula to a Cabotian girl, other than she must be thoroughly entrenched in teenage girldom and completely unapologetic in her right to act her age.
Growing up in the early aughts creates a strange relationship with femininity. We were the girls born out of third-wave feminism, and in many ways, I think this created the tomboy generation. We were the generation of girls who weren’t like other girls, girls who rejected the traditional trappings of femininity not out of personal want but out of demonization on a societal level. With the rise of YA fantasy and dystopian literature taking over the literary landscape for teenage girls, our book protagonists were action heroines who didn’t pay attention to the way they looked and belittled those who did. Katniss and Triss and Hermione were all removed from a sense of girliness, and these books seemed to say that girls who weren’t were vapid and silly and shallow — and most of the time (like Lavender Brown and Glimmer) they ended up dead.
Girliness was dirty, but being too boyish was wrong too. There was no way to win when the ideal of what a girl should be kept changing — you couldn’t be too much like other girls; your friends, sisters, mothers, aunts, teachers, enemies, neighbors, girls on tv, girls at school, at the mall, at church, at camp, but you couldn’t be too different from them either. There was a balance between the two that lay somewhere between playing sports because you grew up with brothers and refusing to wear skirts and hating the color pink and trashing the popular interests for girls your age in favor of something more palatable to men, but also keeping your hair long and letting boys kiss you and having a father figure in the house and putting on makeup as you take your hair out of its ponytail to walk down the stairs at the climax of the movie in a red dress to show that wow, under all of that you really are a girl. And there’s no way you can really ever find it.
Meg Cabot did not seek to find that balance. Mia Thermopolis of The Princess Diaries is gladly and proudly just like other girls — in fact, much of the character journey Mia struggles with is remaining so true to who she is as an average teenage girl just like anybody else, while also being next in line for a foreign throne. Mia isn’t particularly smart in school, she loves talking about boys and television and lifetime movies that she watches with her single mom, and she desperately wants to fit in at school. In many ways, the archetypal “not like other girls” girl is Mia’s best friend Lily, and we as readers see the impact that such a strain would have on their friendship after Lily goes too far with desiring individuality compared to Mia and resenting Mia’s general “alikeness” to the average girl. In contrast, the typical mean girl bully of the early books, the hyper-feminine and popular cheerleader Lana Weinberger, ends the series as one of Mia’s close friends once the two distance themselves from the conflict driven by male validation that they shared in earlier entries.
Even Cabot’s approach to a girl who distanced herself from femininity shows nuance in deconstructing what that even means. In All American Girl, our main character is Sam. She’s obsessed with ska music and particularly No Doubt (a trait shared by all Cabot’s books being a firm entrenchment in the pop culture lexicon of the early 2000s which makes them increasingly nostalgic with each reread as further time passes) and has a wardrobe full of clothes that she has hand-dyed with black ink. She is the middle child of three sisters, the eldest being the beautiful and popular Lucy with whom Sam shares little in common (other than a mutual attraction to Lucy’s boyfriend Jack, but more on that later) and the youngest being Rebecca, a child prodigy who has skipped multiple grades and attends a special gifted school.
The book revolves around Sam after she inadvertently stops an assassination attempt on the President of the United States, but there is a quiet background plot on her coming to terms with her own femininity and what that means in relation to her sisters. Sam resents Lucy for representing everything that she is not, but also knowing exactly who she is and what she likes. So much of the teenage experience is spent pretending to know who you are, and desperately wishing for someone to figure it out for you — and much of the time, we let male opinions dictate what that should be.
Sam does this with Lucy’s boyfriend Jack, a rich kid playing at rebellion with a similarly makeshift punk style that Sam herself also sports — she spends so much of the book desperately trying to win his approval and for him to validate her maturity and her intellect. It’s only when she realizes that Jack is just as clueless as she is when it comes to knowing who he is, and that his ideas about art and intelligence and even femininity are just ignorance covered up by a faux-anarchist sneer, that she validates her own opinions that she knows to be right. She doesn’t need Jack to tell her who she is, or what she believes, and there’s a touching scene with Sam and her sister where Lucy breaks things off with Jack when he attacks Sam for having a different opinion than he does. It’s then that Sam accepts her sister and who she is, and finds that it was her who had spent years pushing Lucy away because of her resentment for what she stood to represent as a symbol of hyper-femininity.
This isn’t to say that it’s all that revolutionary to represent hyper-femininity in girlhood. However, it often feels like you must pick one or the other. You’re either categorized as a girly girl or a tomboy — when that completely negates the nuance that comes with burgeoning femininity in young women. It’s what creates such a negative view of one’s self in relation to their gender expression, and this societal pressure to pick a box to fit in and stay there causes the massive anxieties surrounding appearance and popularity that dominate the teenage mindscape. We never seem to let girls just be.
And when tomboyishness aligns oneself with male interests and in turn fosters a sense of internalized misogyny at the rejection of femininity, it sometimes does feel like being a girl who celebrates her own girlishness, and that of her peers is a contrary statement.
At the core of everything that Cabot writes, there is a sense of shared sisterhood in the feminine experience. In every novel, there are multiple types of girls.
There’s Mia, who’s average and wants to be liked and doesn’t see anything wrong with being a girl who likes being normal. She laughs about gross and uncouth things with her friends, and is completely obsessed with her best friend’s older brother, as she begins to show the first signs of a maturing sexuality.
There’s Sam, who desperately wants to stand out from her excellent sisters, so she completely changes who she is compared to them, and who must figure out who she is in relation to her rejection of traditional girliness?
There’s Steph, of How to Be Popular, who spends an entire book changing herself into the traditional feminine ideal with a book on popularity from the 1950s applied to her early aughts high school, before ending the book with a better understanding of what she will and will not take from such an ideal in relation to who she is and who she wants to be.
There’s every Cabotian protagonist, who is unabashedly a teenage girl — who is self-centered and mean and obsessed with how other people perceive her and how she looks, and who is kind and wants to be a good person and a good daughter and a good friend and wants boys to like her and to feel like a grown-up and to grow up too fast and to not grow up at all.
Being a teenage girl is horrific. You’re a child who people want to view as a woman so that they can look at you the way they want to see you. You want to fit in and you want to stand out. You want to be noticed and you want to be invisible. You hate your parents and you love them fiercely, and you’re sorry that you can’t seem to control how mean you are to them and you’re sorry that they don’t understand you. Cabot writes books about girls who are all of these things. They aren’t saving worlds or fighting monsters or using magic. Maybe they’re princesses or national heroes, but in their hearts, they’re just girls. And that’s all they ever have to be.