A child’s lesson on how to grow up

Looking beyond the bravado-fuelled adolescent friendships, Lauren Windle reviews Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. She finds vulnerability, audacity and intention.

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

A mother and child, wearing 70s clothing, look to the left.

Rachel McAdams and Abby Ryder Fortson.

Gracie Films.

You couldn’t pay me to be an 11-year-old girl again. There is no amount of money that would convince me to re-subject myself to the confusion, self-consciousness and awkwardness of my pre-teen and teenage years. But sitting in the Regents Street Cinema watching a midday screening of the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s popular book Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, it was 1999 again. I felt like I was rolling up my school skirt like the older girls and Sam Eavis had just skateboarded past setting my tummy fluttering.

Margaret is a 1970s year-six pupil (Abby Ryder Fortson) who moved from New York City to New Jersey with her mum (Rachel McAdams) and dad (Benny Safdie). As with any 11-year-old, she failed to see the absolute joy in not worrying about romantic relationships, financial hardship and gainful employment. Instead, she strived to grow up as fast as she possibly could. But faced with bad friends, boy trouble, changing hormones and a feuding family, Margret turned to God for guidance as she navigated the complex new stage.

Margret accompanied her milestones with admirably honest prayers to God, asking for guidance, reprieve, support and protection for her family.

Margaret and her friends moved through the usual rites of passage for a schoolgirl in their sprint to maturity. They obsessed about their first kiss with a boy, starting their periods, getting their first bra, being able to fill out the undergarment, gossiping and bitching between friends and desperately trying to fit in. But, unlike me, Margret accompanied her milestones with admirably honest prayers to God, asking for guidance, reprieve, support and protection for her family.

I felt pleased for Margaret. Not because she was navigating these challenges like a pro. She was doing as well as any us (read: poorly). I was pleased for her because she felt comfortable to loop God in. I never prayed about a boy I fancied or petitioned God to start my period. As a teenager, I was convinced the messy practicalities of life didn’t have a place in the Church and I would certainly never bring them up in prayer. I stuck to the simple formula of sorry, thank you and please. All subjects were highly palatable, like my grades at school or family outings.

Angst-riddled Margret however, learned something that I only picked up on years later when I came back to faith at 25; God cares about the details. We can be so caught up in presenting our best to Him that we forget he’s seen it all anyway. We may want a better sex life or bigger boobs or for someone to be attracted to us, but we wouldn’t pray for it. It’s too embarrassing. Not for Margret – from how she was getting on with her friends to the size of her bra, nothing was off limits in her prayers. There’s a lesson there for us.

Margret wasn’t raised in a church or subscribing to any religion. Her mum (a Christian) was shunned by her family when she announced that she would be marrying her dad (a Jew). The subsequent pain meant that they decided to raise their daughter without any religious affiliation and let her choose for herself. When she started her first prayer Margaret opened with:

“I’ve heard a lot of great things about you.”

When she was desperate to be accepted in her peer group she cried out:

“Let me just be normal and regular like everybody else.”

When she felt lonely, she called out and asked God where he was and when she thought he may not exist, even then she took her frustrations to God, crying out in prayer:

“I’ve prayed and prayed and everything just gets worse. Maybe the truth is there’s nobody out there. There’s nobody listening. It’s just me.”

It's the vulnerability, audacity and intentionality of her honesty that takes Margaret leaps and bounds further in her search for faith. That’s a level of transparency with God that I lacked in my youth, and at times in my adult life. The fact that Margaret hadn’t been to church ironically freed her up to approach God in a refreshing, childlike way. She didn’t have any of the pomp and ceremony of religion. Rather she just came to her creator and started talking, like a child to her father.

So, what can we learn from Margaret’s search for God? Several things. Stuffing your bra looks ridiculous. Adolescent friendships are solely fuelled by bravado. The fragility of pubescent womanhood is both a joy and agonising to watch. And we can talk to God anywhere, anytime, in any mood and about anything.

Seems like we don’t need to go back to school to learn a thing or two after all.

Review

Books

Culture

Ethics

Film & TV

8 November 2024

4 min read

Small Things Like These: putting the spotlight on backstage goodness

What it means for a film to be good.

Kevin Hargaden

Kevin is a social theologian studying ethics and economics.

The gaunt face of a dishevelled man stares into the distance

A ‘stellar’ Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong.

Lionsgate.

Small Things Like These is a novella by the Irish writer Claire Keegan. Published in 2021, it compresses a remarkable story into 128 pages. Acclaimed widely by critics and readers, it follows Bill Furlong, a fuel merchant living in the small County Wexford town of New Ross in 1986, as Christmas approaches. While delivering coal to the local convent, Bill makes an alarming discovery. Memories of his childhood begin to press in on him and he finds himself in an existential crisis.

Like her previous (very short) work, Foster, Small Things Like These is an understated book with a searing moral clarity. And just as Foster was adapted for the screen – in the astonishing Irish-language film The Quiet Girl – a movie version of Small Things Like These is now likely showing at a cinema near you.

The movie is built around a stellar performance from Cillian Murphy. It would be criminal if his name is not featured among the shortlists when awards season comes round. Many of the film’s most arresting scenes feature close-ups of his face as Bill wrestles with the implications of his discovery and the phantoms of his past. The effect is that the film serves as an almost literal portrait of what it means to be a decent person.

The story begins with Bill making a delivery to the convent. He sees a mother drop off her screaming daughter to the back door, where she is met and manhandled inside by a nun. The teenager protests passionately, but to no avail. The viewer understands that this girl has “fallen pregnant”, to use the Hiberno-English idiom that was so common in the twentieth century. She has been dispatched by her family to this institution to serve out the months of pregnancy and to remove any shame or taint from their reputation. Bill watches as the girl shouts out for her father, who is entirely absent.

And, after a tense interaction with an aggressive nun, he goes home to his five girls and his wife, clearly shaken.

A few days later, unable to sleep, haunted by memories of his own childhood being raised by a single mother, with an absent father, relying on the kindness of a wealthy local landowner, he begins his deliveries before dawn. As he deposits peat briquettes in the coal shed of the convent, he discovers a teenaged girl abandoned in the corner of the tiny, filthy room. She is in deep distress and Bill responds instinctively, wrapping his coat around her shoulders and bringing her inside to the convent.

While the existence of Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes were not a secret in twentieth century Ireland, the exact details of their operations were not widely understood. With these two encounters, so close together, and his own personal biography as the son of a woman who was subject to exactly the same marginalising dynamics, Bill can no longer be satisfied to turn a blind eye to the oppression and alienation endured by those sent for reformation.

It evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way.

The film gathers momentum as Bill is forced to confront the way his mother had been treated for “falling pregnant” and the reality experienced by girls the same age as his daughters who were in a similar situation. In the midst of his existential angst, he finds little solace in the no-nonsense pragmatism of his wife who reminds him “there are things you have to ignore” to get on in life. He is taken aside by his local publican, a woman who has similarly scrabbled up from humble origins to establish a thriving business and cautioned to not make trouble for the nuns since “their fingers are in every pie in the town”.

I will refrain from fully revealing every detail of the film’s plot. But this element of the screenplay – where Claire Keegan along with Enda Walsh – draw out the sense in which the oppressive ecclesial institutions were enabled and even sanctioned by the wider population is exceptionally well done. The film does not pull any punches on the evils that were committed in the name of churches in Ireland. Indeed, if anything, the presentation of the nuns veers too far towards caricatures of pure malevolence. But with surgical precision, it evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way.

And that is the lasting significance of this film. Toni Morrison has spoken about how it can seem harder to write about goodness than evil. “Evil has a blockbuster audience; goodness lurks backstage.” In Small Things Like This, Claire Keegan introduces us to a hardworking small business owner who treats his staff well, a loving father who seeks to care for his wife, a man who lives down a back street of a provincial town in an overlooked part of a small island on the periphery of Europe. And in this very definitively backstage context, he is presented as heroic in his pursuit of the Good.

We all fancy ourselves to be the one person who would stand up and oppose systems of oppression if we ever found ourselves enmeshed in them. Cillian Murphy’s depiction of Bill Furlong whispers to us that we likely are enmeshed in just that way and are choosing not to notice. Small Things Like These is a heavy film that somehow liberates. It reminds us that there is, within each of us, this appetite for seeing the Good and bring brave enough to do it. It is worth your time far more than any competing blockbuster.