"When I was about nine my mother saw an ad in the paper for a series of books by Maud Hart Lovelace. She showed it to me and asked if I would be interested. She wanted some assurance, I guess, that if she ordered these books I would read them. The ad, from Bambergers department store in Newark, New Jersey, was intriguing. It promised stories about two girls, Betsy and Tacy, who are best friends. So I told my mother, yes, I would like to read them. I understood that this was different than taking books out of the library. If I started a library book and didn’t like it, I could take it back. This was a commitment. We didn’t just go to the bookstore to buy children’s books then, though I was proud of the shelves of grown-up books in our living room. My mother was always reading, usually the latest best-sellers, and my father unwound at night with mysteries. A neat stack of books sat on each of their bedside tables.

"Though I owned all the Oz books (and would eventually buy a Nancy Drew mystery each Saturday), I loved our weekly trips downtown to the main branch of the public library, where I climbed a set of rickety outside stairs to get to the children’s room. Once there, I would sit on the floor, sniff the books, and browse. At home, I waited anxiously for the Betsy-Tacy books to arrive. And when they did, I sniffed them to see if they smelled as good as the books I borrowed from the public library. They did. Even better.

"I’d always liked to read, but until the Betsy-Tacy books I’d never found stories about girls who were anything like me and my friends. Even though I knew from the start the books took place in the olden days, the characters felt so real it didn’t matter what they wore, or how they fixed their hair, or that they thought a dollar was a lot of money. In fact, I found these details fascinating. I couldn’t wait to read the next book or the one after that, following Betsy Ray’s life. Betsy sometimes made mistakes, she sometimes talked too much. She could be stubborn, or angry, or sad. Best of all, she had a lot of imagination. I totally identified with her. She was a girl who’d been making up stories all her life, just like me. Until then I was sure I was the only one. But unlike Betsy, I never told anyone about my stories. And I never wrote them down, either.

"I’d think about Betsy and her friends as I went to bed at night, wondering what would happen next. I didn’t care that they were only five years old at the beginning of the first book. I never felt that I was reading a baby book. Besides, I knew that Betsy, Tacy, and Tib were going to grow older in each book. I knew that they’d soon be older than me. And I didn’t want to miss a minute. I needed to know as much about them as I possibly could. I longed to know them as well as they knew each other.

"The following year my mother surprised me with the next three books in the series. Now Betsy was a teenager. Given the chance, I’d have jumped right into the pages of those books to share the famous "Sunday Night Lunches" at Betsy’s house. And afterward, to gather around the piano with Betsy and her friends, singing for hours. It seemed to me that Betsy had a perfect life—good friends and a warm, secure, and loving family, where she knew someone was always on her side.

"While I didn’t feel the darker undercurrents I sometimes felt in my own family, or even in my own friendships, I still believed in Betsy. I laughed and cried and dreamed with her. I loved those books too much to ever do a book report on them. They weren’t for sharing. They were for keeping deep inside.

"Did Betsy inspire me to become a writer? After all, she knew when she was very young that’s exactly what she was going to be when she grew up, and she never changed her mind. But writing wasn’t on my mind when I was reading about her, so I would have to answer, probably not, although who can say where inspiration really comes from?

"I don’t know why I didn’t get to read the last three books in the series (Betsy and Joe, Betsy and the Great World, and Betsy’s Wedding) when I was growing up. Surely I would have, if only I’d known about them. I read them recently for the first time. I was nervous as I opened to the first page. What if the stories didn’t hold up well? What if I couldn’t imagine girls today caring about Betsy? But I didn’t have to worry. I was swept into Betsy’s life the way I had been years ago. And by the time I read the final page of the last book, I was crying so hard my husband thought something terrible had happened. I explained it wasn’t sadness that was making me cry—it was finding friends I thought I’d lost.

"A whole generation of girls my age came to feel that Betsy was their friend. It’s comforting to know that no matter how many years go by, no matter how different things are today, what’s inside us is still the same. And what makes a good book hasn’t changed either. Some characters become your friends for life. That’s how it was for me with Betsy and Tacy."

— Judy Blume