The girls are all right

How did Sarah feel about you writing this book?

People ask me that all the time. Many assume that she would not be happy about this. It was that same assumption all over again: Girls are trouble; this is going to cause problems. I don't think these people were even thinking about Sarah and me, specifically. They'd bought the stereotype about polarized moms and daughters, and they couldn't imagine us communicating enough to fill a book. Maybe a small pamphlet, but a whole book? Full of what -- "Where'd you go?" "Out." "What'd you do?" "Nothing." It's what we fear and expect, and the notion of an alternative brings out the skepticism in everybody.

What I heard from Sarah and her friends was that girls are starting to resent the way they're portrayed in this culture. They're like, "Enough already." Sarah liked the idea of a reappraisal that would attempt to give girls their due. She was really excited to see the first copies of the books, and she seems very happy with the result.

In the book, you mention several psychologists and scholars who have written about adolescent girls, including Judith Rich Harris, Lyn Mikel Brown, Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher and Rosalind Wiseman. It sounds like you were suspicious of some of this work, especially Pipher's ideas that girls' self-esteem plummets as they hit adolescence.

I didn't make a conscious decision to take on anyone who has written about adolescent girls. I'm not here to say throw out all the books about "bad girls," girls who are having problems. They exist and they need the compassion and attention that we can give them.

But I also think we shouldn't assume that all girls are going to end up that way. When you look at the statistics, most girls are not going to have those problems.

[It's like what happened with] menopause. We used to think it was a living nightmare. The only data we had was from women who were in real distress. Their distress was real, but the vast majority of women were too busy living to report their problems. We never saw that population. That population didn't have a voice in the same way reasonable girls who are neither wretched nor perfect don't have a voice right now.

You admit that your small sampling "is no more statistically significant than all the bad-girl data, but it is no less true." If you really wanted to show the world that not all girls go bad, and that a troubled few get all the attention, why did you decide to make the book so autobiographical? Why not interview large numbers of mothers and daughters?

I felt there was enough research at the base of this to make it credible. I really believe a detailed story about one person carries a different kind of resonance than a story about lots of people. You get fewer numbers but more impact.

Yes, but you also set yourself up for skepticism, for people to say, "Well, that's just a small number of girls."

Here's my question for those skeptics: Why are you so eager not to believe this? If it's your kid, why are you so unwilling to entertain the notion that she's marvelous?

Sarah is an accomplished rider and has her own horse. To many people, equestrian sports are the domain of the rich and privileged. Do you worry that this will cause other moms to hold the book -- and your conclusions about happy teens -- at arm's length? Do you think people will say to themselves, "How could Sarah not grow up happy? She's lived a privileged life. She's one of the lucky ones."

It's the girls of the middle- and upper-middle class who often suffer the kinds of problems that we read about -- eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, the oral sex epidemic. But our sense of proportion about them -- It must be everyone! Everywhere! -- is so out of whack. If anything, Sarah's demographics make the message here even more urgent.

If you look through the bad-girl literature and watch the bad-girl movies, you usually see girls who have all the creature comforts. Since they don't have to deal with basic needs, they go looking for more imaginative ways to get into trouble. But the bad-girl cliché is just that. It doesn't pertain to all girls, or even to most girls, and I like the idea of Sarah and her pals standing up for the rest of our daughters.

Is this book your attempt to present a different spin on pre-adolescence?

There are other books that are oral histories of difficulty. There is no history of regularness, of reasonableness, or of the attempts to maintain a relationship. What I found when I started to ask around was that there were a lot of moms who never said anything about [the experience of raising their daughters] because their experience had been fine. They just didn't speak up because they didn't know that [women like me] needed reassurance.

When I ask women who have children what they thought of the book, they say they felt a tremendous amount of relief. They felt like they weren't crazy and alone. Or, if their daughters are younger, they feel the way I felt when I met those high school girls: "Oh my goodness, it's not going to be that bad." I hope that people will gain strength and encouragement from this.

Why did you choose to end the book with Sarah's 14th birthday? She doesn't even have her driver's license yet -- a milestone you referred to several times, with notable apprehension.

When I started the book and she was 10, people would say, "She's not 12 yet, just you wait." Then we'd get to 12, and they'd say, "Just wait until she's 13." No matter where I was, the only reason she was good was because we hadn't gotten to "bad" yet. Well, she's 15 and a half and we're fine, thank you. If the guillotine is still hanging over my head, the hinges are starting to rust. If you [as a parent] have "the end is nigh!" philosophy, you're going to miss everything.

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