When we first meet Margaret Simon, the winsome protagonist of Judy Blume’s novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, she is just 11. Even at so young an age, she is beset by existential angst. For one thing, she has to accommodate to life on the strange planet called suburban New Jersey, her parents having packed up and moved away from New York City. “Long Island is too social—Westchester is too expensive—and Connecticut is too inconvenient,” they explain.

It’s not a convincing argument. But New Jersey it is—and with it, new rituals, such as running around under lawn sprinklers on a hot day. But there’s more: Margaret constantly writes missives to God, but she’s not sure whether she believes in God even as she does so. Her father is Jewish, her mother Christian; her mother’s family has disowned her because of that crossing-the-line marriage while her father’s mother worries that Margaret hasn’t made a slew of Jewish friends across the Hudson.

There’s more. Margaret and her new girlfriends are transforming into young women, giving rise to considerable anxiety and many questions for her. Her body is changing, and God isn’t helping by explaining what’s going on. Her new friend Nancy, meanwhile, proclaims, “In a few years I’m going to look like one of those girls in Playboy,” and chides Margaret for not knowing other suburban rituals, such as spin the bottle.

Margaret goes out on a quest that would do Joseph Campbell proud, investigating churches, synagogues, books on matters divine, asking God for guidance by means of her short, plaintive letters (“I guess this is my punishment for being a horrible person”). In time she turns 12, her body changing some more, the rift in her family happily mending. She’s hardly a horrible person at all, but the self-doubt lingers, as it does in every smart, sensitive soul.

When Judy Blume’s beloved novel first appeared half a century ago, in 1970, it came under immediate attack by a certain kind of militantly pious person for committing two great sins: It depicted the physical changes a girl goes through on the path to adulthood without blinking (and with various physical facts plainly explained), and it questioned the existence and omnipotence of a monotheistic deity. Half a century on, it continues to rank high on the American Library Association’s annual list of the most challenged books for just those reasons. The book is also set to have its first screen adaptation: Lionsgate has greenlit a movie written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig.  

If Margaret Simon were a real-live person—and she is, of course, in the hearts of millions of readers—then she’d be in her early 60s now, about my age. If you want to see what existential angst looks like for our cohort now, rush out to see Michael Apted’s film 63 Up, the latest, and perhaps last, installment in a magnificent documentary series that has aired every seven years since 1964. A Margaret is there among its subjects, speaking in a British accent, growing up before our eyes but still the wide-eyed, questioning young woman of 1970, destined to remain so for as long as there are readers.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.