Then Again, Maybe I Won't

Then Again, Maybe I Won't is a young adult novel by the American writer Judy Blume, published in 1971. It deals with puberty from the point of view of a boy, along with the other difficulties of being thirteen.

Tony Miglione's father sells an electronics invention and the family moves from a working-class neighbourhood in New Jersey to a wealthy town on Long Island. Tony's mother becomes preoccupied with the family's social position, his grandmother becomes angry and withdrawn when she is no longer allowed to run the kitchen, and his older brother gives up teaching for a better-paid job in the same business as their father.

At the same time Tony is dealing with changes of his own, including an interest in girls he has no idea how to manage, and with a new friend named Joel Hoober, whose manners impress Tony's parents and whose private behaviour, including shoplifting, Tony finds alarming. The novel is told in Tony's own voice, and the stomach pains he develops are the book's way of showing what he cannot say out loud.