It is Christmas 1991. I am nine years old, wearing a chambray shirt with the top three buttons unbuttoned to reveal a white turtleneck underneath, and a neon, translucent Swatch watch. In this old photo I recently found in a hard-copy album, I am vaguely scowling and intentionally ignoring my dad behind the camera, engrossed in an open book: The Babysitters Club Super Special #7: Snowbound.
Almost 30 years later, I won’t pretend to recall the plot of that particular Super Special—one of the fat, white books in the then-juggernaut series—beyond the harrowing description of a monster blizzard stranding the sitters in various locales. (The details of California Girls!, in which Dawn takes the club to Disneyland, is seared deeper in my memory.) But I remember the wholesome, tween world of The Babysitters Club—the book’s pastel spines lined on my bookshelf in numerical order, next to my birthday girl figurines—with all the nostalgia of childhood pizza parties-cum-sleepovers.
There was Kristy, the original female startup founder and “girlboss” who presided over weekly BSC meetings in a director’s chair; her bookish best friend and neighbor, Mary Anne, the club’s secretary with a strict widower dad, who communed with Kristy via flashlight code between their bedroom windows. I relished the descriptions of the artistic, puff-painting Claudia, who had her own phone line, hid Twizzlers in her hollowed-out books, and whose fashion icon was Miss Frizzle from The Magic School Bus. (I may still be mourning the death of her beloved grandma, Mimi.) The consummate cool girl, the cosmopolitan New York transplant Stacey, had what was billed as a salacious secret (to say nothing of Laine, her comparatively fast friend back on the Upper West Side). They were just slightly older and more independent than me, but never in an inaccessible way. I devoured all of their mundane-yet-riveting-to-me stories, sometimes three a week—in the car, on the beach, even on Christmas.
“Packing the latest BSC book in your overnight bag at a friend’s sleepover was as imperative as your toothbrush,” Libby Golden, a former Babysitters Club devotee, told me. Unlike her mom’s Nancy Drews, the BSC reflected her own contemporary 80s and 90s life, back when there was no competition from iPhones. For baby future English majors, the series marked the beginning of critical reading skills. “You extended yourself special credit if you could skip right through chapter 2, the rote, explanatory recap, appearing in every book, about Kristy’s light bulb moment during family dinner one night,” Golden said.