Since 1986, generations of kids have seen the best parts of themselves on the pages of The Baby-Sitters Club novels.
The most common follow-up when meeting a fan of the series is, "Which babysitter are you?" I'm a Stacey — with a Kristy rising. There's also Claudia and Mary Anne rounding out the club, and later Dawn, Mallory, and Jessi.
It's easy to see why the books have endured for four decades. There was something, and someone, for everyone in the The Baby-Sitters Club, starting with the original four. Cool-girl Claudia, one of the first Asian-American characters in mainstream culture, with her funky outfits and artistic bent. Soft-spoken Mary Anne, an introvert with a quiet resilience. Stacey, with her endless closet and knack for math, is living with diabetes. And Kristy, in her baseball cap, who can outrun anyone, hates dresses, and is the founder and president of the babysitting club.
Of course their creator, Ann M. Martin, has to answer the question, too.
"Mary Anne is based on me. She's the shy one," she said during a visit to her house in upstate New York in July. And indeed a true Mary Anne, Martin has a designated craft room where she's sewn handmade dresses and clothing for the children and grandchildren of her friends for years.
In her office, the bookshelves are replete with every candy-colored edition of the original Baby-Sitters Club books — along with the whole BSC multiverse, including the graphic novels that brought the books to a new generation of readers, and all the series' spin-offs. There are rows of Baby-Sitters Club: Mysteries, Super Specials, Friends Forever, Baby-Sitters Little Sister, and even the mysterious California Diaries (for readers seeking more about Dawn's life on the West Coast).
Martin has written more than 100 books, and her name is on hundreds more in the franchises she started. Across the room from the Baby-Sitters archive is the collection of standalone novels by Martin — including the Newbery Honor book A Corner of the Universe and my favorite, With You and Without You, the first really serious book about death I ever read (I wept into my pillow at sleepaway camp). Martin says the books she's most proud of are A Corner of the Universe, Rain Reign and the very first BSC book, Kristy's Great Idea.
Ann M. Martin's great idea
The idea for a series about a babysitters club initially came to Martin from an editorial director at Scholastic. "She just said, 'I have a title in mind, The Baby-Sitters Club.' And it was up to me to figure out what that might be."
Martin had plenty of material to draw from — she started as a mother's helper and babysat throughout junior high, high school and college.
For the personalities of the core four girls — Kristy, Claudia, Stacey and Mary Anne — Martin drew on her own life, and relationships with her friends. The founder of the club, Kristy, was based on her best friend, Beth McKeever. And they're still close.
"This is the 66th time I've wished her a happy birthday," McKeever said shortly after Martin turned 71 in August.
They met as kids, living a few houses apart on the same street, and became nearly inseparable. McKeever remembers that there was barely a question of whether they would be friends.
"It wasn't, 'I don't know if I want to be friends or not,'" she said. "It was, 'No, we are friends. And whose house are we going to today?'"
The childhood McKeever describes sounds strikingly Kristy-like: ambitious projects, immediate plans and a firm belief that whatever they had just thought of was probably doable.
"We always had an idea," McKeever said. "I think the thing that made me Kristy is I probably saw things and said, 'I think we can do this.'"
That can-do spirit is present in all of the Baby-Sitters Club novels.
Martin's writing across her work from the BSC novels onward is straightforward and emotionally forthright. (It's also frequently quite funny.) The girls in The Baby-Sitters Club have their problems and insecurities, but they are also capable. They organize meetings. They run a business. They take care of children, and in some memorable cases, save the day. They are responsible for things. Stacey even gives herself insulin shots every day. (I don't know a woman my age that wasn't constantly vigilant to the possibility of Type 1 diabetes in her friends.)
"When I first started writing the books, I had two good friends who were diabetic," Martin said. "I got and still get letters from either kids who have accurately diagnosed themselves as having diabetes, or parents now, who have kids and have diagnosed [them], just from having read about Stacey."
Martin treated the everyday dramas — fights with friends, crushes and family changes — with tender seriousness. But the books don't shy away from harder, scarier things like divorce, illness and death. Readers responded enthusiastically, writing to her about their own issues.
At one point, the letters arriving from young readers became serious enough that Martin's publisher, Scholastic, made a consulting psychologist available to help Martin respond to children writing about bullying, abuse and eating disorders.
"I felt a great deal of responsibility," Martin said. She became increasingly aware that readers were looking not only to the characters, but to Martin herself "as role models or people that they could go to for advice."
The Baby-Sitters Club was so popular that the workload became intense. At one point, Martin was writing two books a month and the spin-offs were becoming popular as well. She suggested that she could step back a little bit and let other authors write for the series. "I felt very protective of the characters, but I wanted the series to go on," she said. "It was with the caveat that I would still outline every book, line edit every book before it went to the editor."
The world of Stonybrook expanded many times over the years to accommodate other creative voices. Graphic novels by cartoonists like Raina Telgemeier and Gale Galligan modernized the series, as did a beloved Netflix adaptation (its ultimate cancellation is up there with the injustice of My So Called Life's demise in 1995). There's even a new, full-length Baby-Sitters Club stage musical in development, with music and lyrics by KPop Demon Hunters songwriter Mark Sonnenblick.
Eventually, the first readers and fans grew up — and some of them became writers.
Readers become writers
Becky Albertalli came to the club through the Little Sister series, about Karen, Kristy's stepsister. "My parents separated when I was seven, and Karen was the first time I had ever read about a family that looked like mine — I was a joint custody kid," she says. It was the first time she'd seen her own life represented on the page. "It did make me feel like, you know, my life was worth reading about or writing about."
Now, Albertalli is the author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, which was adapted into the film Love, Simon. It's part of a book series that, among other things, is a joyful depiction of high school queer romance.
Albertalli is also one of a group of former BSC readers-turned-writers invited to contribute to a new 40th anniversary novel. Each writer took on the point of view of a different member of the club.
Albertalli unexpectedly got Kristy. "I did not think any of us were going to be assigned Kristy," she said. "I guess because Kristy's the president, like the first book narrator and stuff, it didn't even occur to me that Kristy was on the table."
It felt, she said, like "an honor on top of an honor."
In Albertalli's story, Kristy meets a girl named Rowan, who is openly queer. The friendship leads Kristy toward a new kind of self-discovery. Albertalli said the storyline grew partly out of the way many LGBTQ readers have long interpreted Kristy. "There's no pure consensus on any one of these characters," she said. "But she is a very, very beloved character among LGBT women."
Albertalli points out that many people have always seen elements of the original Kristy character as queer-coded. That was how Albertalli understood her, too. "It's something that was incredibly special for me to write about because I was a little bisexual kid as I was reading these books, but I had no idea," she said. "That was something that I figured out in adulthood."
Writing Kristy's storyline, she said, became "an opportunity to kind of give this character some of the clarity that I did not have at the time."
(And yes: Kristy gets to kiss a girl).
Albertalli said she felt a responsibility to put that subtext explicitly on the page for a character who has meant so much to generations of readers.
"I truly hope I did her justice," she said. "I also understand kind of the significance of what … LGBT Kristy could mean for a lot of kids and also adults — former kids."
The Kristy storyline in the Fan Edition shows how much has changed culturally since the series began in 1986, including the kinds of stories for young readers that can be published and discussed openly. But The Baby-Sitters Club universe has always been expanding. It's been rewritten, illustrated and adapted for new generations. Though some references have changed along the way
— VCRs have largely disappeared and cellphones have entered the picture — Claudia's landline, somehow, endures.
And so do the characters. Martin says they remain, in her mind, fundamentally themselves. It's part of the reason we all still know exactly which ones we identify with.
Martin never particularly wanted to imagine them as adults. "I liked imagining them and living with them just as they were," she said. And, anyway, her beloved readers have become invested enough to imagine futures for them, as they lived out their own.
"I think that's great," she said. "That's how it should be."
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