We Are the Baby-Sitters Club Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers

by Crawford, Marisa; Milks, Megan; Wilson, Mara

• ISBN13: 9781641604901
• ISBN10: 1641604905
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781641604918
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2021-07-06
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• More Book Details

Summary

“We Are the Baby-Sitters Club is the ultimate companion guide for a generation of devout superfans. This book revisits the beloved series through grown-up eyes—but never loses the magic we all felt the moment we cracked open a fresh new book. BSC forever!" —Lucia Aniello, director and executive producer of The Baby-Sitters Club Netflix series

A nostalgia-packed, star-studded anthology featuring contributors such as Kristen Arnett, Yumi Sakugawa, Myriam Gurba, and others exploring the lasting impact of Ann M. Martin’s beloved Baby-Sitters Club series

In 1986, the first-ever meeting of the Baby-Sitters Club was called to order in a messy bedroom strewn with RingDings, scrunchies, and a landline phone. Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne launched the club that birthed an entire generation of loyal readers.

Ann M. Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club series featured a complex cast of characters and touched on an impressive range of issues that were underrepresented at the time: divorce, adoption, childhood illness, class division, and racism, to name a few.

In We Are the Baby-Sitters Club, writers and a few visual artists from the original BSC generation will reflect on the enduring legacy of Ann M. Martin’s beloved series, thirty-five years later—celebrating the BSC’s profound cultural influence.

Contributors include Paperback Crush author Gabrielle Moss, illustrator Siobhán Gallagher, and filmmaker Sue Ding, as well as New York Times bestselling author Kristen Arnett, Lambda Award–finalist Myriam Gurba, Black Girl Nerds founder Jamie Broadnax, and Paris Review contributor Frankie Thomas.

One of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2021, We Are the Baby-Sitters Club looks closely at how Ann M. Martin’s series shaped our ideas about gender politics, friendship, fashion and beyond.

Author Biography

Marisa Crawford is a poet and cultural critic whose writing has appeared in The Nation, VICE, Bitch, BUST, Ms., The Rumpus, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. She is the author of two collections of poetry and the founder of Weird Sister, a website and organization that explores the intersections of feminism, literature, and pop culture.

Megan Milks is an award-winning fiction author with a debut novel forthcoming in 2021. Their stories have been published in three anthologies, as well as journals including Fence, PANK, LIT, and Yes Femmes. Their critical writing has appeared in Bookforum, 4Columns, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere.

Table of Contents

Foreword 
Introduction: We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Marisa Crawford and Megan Milks 
Say Hello to Your Friends: Girl Groups and Friendship Culture 
“Fun with Roleplay”: Kristen Arnett
“The Same…but Different”: Anjali Khosla
“Thirteen Things a Middle-Aged Man Can Learn from The Baby-Sitters Club”: Jack Shepherd
“No Boys Allowed: On Girl Groups, Boyfriends, and Kristy’s Great Anxiety”:  Megan Milks
“Could Mary Anne Save the Soul?”: Jeanne Thornton
“Getting Over Claudia and Calories”: Jennifer Epperson
Fashion Statements: Personal Style in the BSC 
“What the BSC Wore (And What It Meant)”: Kim Hutt Mayhew
“I Want to Be a Claudia but I Know I’m a Stacey”: Marisa Crawford
“Guess the Baby-Sitter: A Pop Quiz”: Buzz Slutzky
“Scripts of Girlhood: Handwriting and the Baby-Sitters Club”: Kelly Blewett
The BSC and Us: On Seeing Ourselves Reflected (Or Not) 
“Let’s Talk About Jessi”: Yodassa Williams
“The Truth About Being a Pre-Teen Diabetic”: Jami Sailor
“Claudia Kishi, My Asian-American Female Role Model of the '90s”: Yumi Sakugawa
“The Different Shades of Jessi Ramsey”: Jamie Broadnax
“‘I’ve Been Thinking About Families Lately’”: Kristen Felicetti
“Kristy and the Secrets of Autism and Ableism”: Haley Moss
“Making The Claudia Kishi Club”: Sue Ding
“Jessi on the Margins: Black Characters Then & Now”: Chanté Griffin
Be Bossy: Entrepreneurship and the Business of Babysitting 
“Kristy’s Invisible Hand and Das Baby-Sitters Club Kapital”: Myriam Gurba
“Data-Sitters Club Super-Special: Business Is to Successful as Baby Sitter Is to…”: Quinn Dombrowski, Anouk Lang, Katherine Bowers, Maria Sachiko Cecire, Roopika Risam,  Lee Skallerup Bessette
“I Am My Own Mr. Mom: Gender, Caregiving, and Labor in the BSC”:  Caolan Madden
Great Ideas: The BSC World Beyond Stoneybrook 
“Jaded Quitters Club”:  Siobhan Gallagher
“Could The Baby-Sitters Club Have Been More Gay?”:Frankie Thomas
“No Ship Too Small: A Deep-Dive into Baby-Sitters Club Fan Fiction”: Logan Hughes
“From Girl Friends to Monster Sitters: How the BSC Spawned a Whole Moral  Universe”: Gabrielle Moss