Our Favorite Fictional Friends

Meg Murry (Part II)

A Wrinkle in Time

As a nine year-old reader of A Wrinkle in Time, I liked to think I had a few things in common with Meg Murry. Like me, she was the oldest child. She too was myopic enough to make glasses necessary whether she liked them or not. And like me, she was different in distinctly nerd-like fashion.

Yet in deeper ways, we were nothing like each other. The daughter of scientists, she was a far better student than I could ever hope to be. And as the protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic story, Meg was inherently more inquisitive, and exhibited far more bravery than I could in my dreams muster. Readers of the book know how she sets off with her misfit little brother and the dashing Calvin O’Keefe to rescue her father on the dark planet Camazotz. And in the course of the book, she travels by tesseract to rescue her father, and as complications demand, her little brother Charles Wallace as well.

Despite self-doubt, Meg’s intelligence, determined calm and awesome mettle see her through. And then there’s the matter of her role as a female protagonist in a book of science fiction, which made her all the more admirable. To say I would have liked to be Meg’s bff is an understatement. Like legions of L’Engle’s devoted readers, I not only wanted to befriend Meggy, I wanted to be Meggy, and never more than in that moment when Calvin, in a trope movie moment, takes off her glasses and tells her she has “dreamboat eyes.”

-Lauren Alwan