The Good, the Bad and the Barbie is what the book is called and it’s coming out in October of 2010. The subtitle is “The History of the Doll and Her Impact on Us.” The reason that I started thinking about Barbie is that I had just finished writing the Ella Fitzgerald book in the Up Close Series that Viking does and my editor and I, Catherine Frank, were talking on the phone about what I might want to do next for that series.
I was sort of reviewing the criteria for the series with her on the phone and I said, “Okay, so the Up Close Series needs to be a 20th Century Figure, an iconic figure, someone who has impacted our culture in a big way, and someone the kids know about and/or care about.” And I said, “Barbie!”
She laughed and I said, “No, I’m serious.” And she said, “Oh! Okay, well, tell me why.” And we started to talk about why. And so what we decided was that it wouldn’t be a good fit for the Up Close series because, you know, Barbie doesn’t exactly look good on a shelf next to Thurgood Marshall and Bobby Kennedy and Frank Lloyd Wright, but we decided to do it as a stand-alone title, which was great because then I could just explore the topics that I thought would be interesting to explore.
The beginning of that book is sort of who is Ruth Handler and why did she invent Barbie in the first place. Then I go into thematic chapters about body image, and racial diversity, and role playing and things like that. I had people all over the country write in and share their sort of anecdotes and memories and quotes which I incorporated into all of those thematic chapters.
So whereas in Almost Astronauts I had a definite point of view, in this story I’m sort of pulling the camera back a little bit and letting the people speak as it were. Here’s this chapter on body image and here are some questions that I pose and, well, what do you guys think about it?
Surprisingly, it was extremely well balanced between the pros and the cons, the positives and the negatives, which I found kind of interesting. I had just as many 15 and 16 year olds telling me that they thought that Barbie was a perfectly good role model because with Barbie you could do anything you wanted, you could be whoever you wanted, which was Ruth’s initial intention.
Others think she’s this horrible, you know, terrible body role image for young girls and she makes me feel bad about myself. So it was really, really interesting to sort of look at both sides of the coin and look at these different issues about how she’s impacted our culture.
