Freaky Friday

1972, 1977 Perennial Library (Harper & Row) movie tie-in edition
Mary Rodgers
Freaky Friday
Probably bought new, for $1.25
Worn paperback
B

It's hard for me to be brief about this book because I read it so much as a kid.  That this copy isn't in worse shape is due to my owning an earlier edition, with the wonderful Edward Gorey cover.  I had to get this edition though because the 1976 movie version was one of my favorites from Disney.  Yes, they changed Annabel's and her mother's hair from brown to blonde, but it was otherwise perfectly cast, from Patsy Kelly as boozy Mrs. Schmauss to John Astin as Annabel's father, Mr. Andrews, and to this day I most identify Barbara Harris with the movie.  (Jodie Foster had a string of wise-ass teenager roles already.) 

They also changed it from New York City to the California suburbs.  The setting does matter in the book, because one of the issues between Annabel and her mother is how dangerous it is for Annabel to go places on her own, and when Annabel's mind is in her mother's body, and she's not quite sure whose mind is in her own body, she gets really scared about her body's safety.  What if she's injured and her mother understandably wants to switch bodies back?

And what if her mother doesn't want to switch back?  There's a weird undercurrent because, although Annabel's parents sleep in separate beds, her father will probably want to have sex, especially when Annabel wants to go see a dirty flick like Brucey & Betsy.  In the 2003 movie version, which changed a lot including names, the parents are divorced but Tess the mom is engaged.  In both movies (and the 1995 Shelley Long TV-movie, which I've never seen), outside forces cause the switch, while in the book, it's all Mom's doing.  In 1976, mother and daughter simultaneously wish aloud to swap, while in '95 it's "a pair of magical amulets" (?!), and in '03 it's a set of fortune cookies.  That version adds racist stereotypes, which some casual viewers blame on the "dated" book!

Yeah, OK, the book is dated, but not in that way.  If anything, Rodgers and/or Annabel go out of their way to show how liberal they are.  One of the reasons Annabel fires Mrs. Schmauss is because the latter is racist.  (But the thing about the "colored pencil" is funny!)  When Annabel imagines scenarios for her crush Boris to realize she's "the beautiful kidnapper" (too long to explain), she pictures herself on the phone with different guys, including "a black friend of mine called-- let's see...called--uh--Gordon."  Sounds like she's been watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Sesame Street, and sounds like she's trying too hard.

Annabel is also into Women's Lib, and calls both her father and her six-year-old brother Ben (nicknamed "Ape Face") male chauvinist pigs.  She has her own assumptions about gender roles though, and is surprised that Boris can cook.

Getting back to the switch, Mrs. Andrews does it to show Annabel how hard adulthood, in this case the life of an urban housewife, is.  She herself learns a bit about how hard it is to be 13, but unlike in the movies we get only a glimpse of her side of the switch, and she ditches school, so it's not a typical day anyway.  (The captions to the movie stills in this edition try to get around this contradiction, and then imply that Annabel enjoys smoking while in her mother's body, which isn't true in either book or movie.)  While the idea of a "typical mom" who has secret magic powers is intriguing, I think in this case the movies were right to split things equal time.  That's what Rodgers herself does in Summer Switch, where Annabel's father and brother swap for a longer time.  (I've read it once, and it wasn't as good as the original, or the middle book, A Billion for Boris, 1974.)

Just as Sheila Levine is Dead... is in the form of a suicide note, this New York novel turns out to be a special project for the English class that Annabel is flunking.  After going to a parent-teacher conference, Annabel realizes what an underachiever she is, so she spends the whole weekend after the freaky Friday writing "a long paper," with Morris (Boris's real name) typing it up.  She even includes the grade she got on it, although maybe we're meant to think she added the last page later.  And she circles back to the classic beginning, "You are not going to believe me...When I woke up this morning, I found I'd turned into my mother."

I could go on and on about this book, but I'll try to limit myself to just a few more observations.  I feel like I read it before I could read it, in the sense that there's a lot of weird phrasing that I just didn't get, like when Annabel imagines a headline of "INSANE MOTHER OF TWO STABS FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD BABYSITTER WITH BALL-POINT PEN," and for a long time I thought "stabs" was supposed to be a noun.  The imaginary book titles with Swedish brothers Spunk and Zip are still laugh-out-loud.  Rodgers will sometimes throw in a "zonk" or some other cartoonish sound effect, for emphasis.  I don't know if this is her trying to sound adolescent or hip, or if it's just her own offbeat phraseology.  Annabel is very verbal, and that appealed to me as a kid, even when I didn't quite get it.

I went back and forth on whether this is children's or YA, just like I couldn't decide between B or B+ for awhile.  Part of the problem is that Annabel is both a kid (still with a dollhouse and a canopy bed) and a young adolescent who goes to parties with kissing games.  While it obviously can be read by preteens, I'm going to go with a young YA (junior high), because it does mention drugs and rape, and it's aimed at roughly the same age group as Why Not Join the Giraffes? (1968).  Dinky Hocker is more of a high-school YA I think, because it's darker.

As for B or B+, that is hard.  I will always feel great affection for this book, because it was so much a part of my childhood, even if in the late '70s a line like "Our generation cares about the environment" already sounded so dated, not just because ecology was less of an issue than in the early '70s (strange but true) but because of Annabel's earnestness/self-righteousness.  Yet I have to think about how Freaky Friday looks to me as an adult, especially as part of this project.  What the 37 B+s (so far) all have in common is "Wow!" moments.  I was certainly entertained this time through but I wasn't wowed.

Yet there are good moments, like when Annabel and Ape Face learn that you can hate someone and love them at the same time.  My feelings about this book aren't that extreme.  I don't love this book, but I could write about it for hours.  Knowing that A Billion for Boris isn't too far off, I'm holding back my thoughts on such subjects as Annabel's relationship with Boris, the friendship of each with Ape Face, and continuity.  OK, real quick.  No matter whose mind is in your body, you can't be five feet tall and then five feet three a few hours later!