What happens to girls in that pivotal year between girlhood and adolescence? Is 12 the last year girls are allowed to still be children? Is being 12 a different experience today than it was 50 years ago? What exactly is so significant about the 12-year-old experience for girls and women?
I'm doing research for a book called "When I Was Twelve" that's going to be a nonfiction look at what it's like to be a 12-year-old girl in America. I'm hoping to interview hundreds of women of different ages, races, geographical locations, economic backgrounds, and careers, and have them tell me their stories. With this project I hope to examine the ordinary and extraordinary experience of being 12 through the voices of real women as they share their stories from that crucial year in American girlhood.
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Andrea Buchanan is the author of Mother Shock, managing editor of LiteraryMama, and the editor of the anthologies It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons; Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, and It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters. Her work has been featured in The Christian Science Monitor; Parents, NickJr., and Child magazines; and in the collections Breeder, Your Children Will Raise You, The Imperfect Mom, and About What Was Lost. When she was twelve, she had a dream that she had a cricket in her hair, only to wake up and discover she had a cricket in her hair.
© 2006 by Andrea J. Buchanan