Are You There, Judy?

In 1978, People magazine printed a risqué five-page feature on the best-selling author Judy Blume. Blume was already a superstar in children’s publishing, but the People article coincided with the release of her bawdy first adult novel, Wifey, and it opened with a full-page photo of Blume reclining in a lacy negligee on her bed. In another, she had her legs entwined around her husband’s waist with the caption, “In a playful moment, Judy tells husband Tom, ‘I let you live out your fantasies. This is position No. 32.’” 

The “author as sex kitten” was a seemingly odd marketing ploy for a best-selling children’s writer, albeit one who had built her reputation on tackling previously taboo subjects like puberty and sexuality in books aimed at a pre-teen audience. Blume’s rise had been meteoric, fueled in part by her remarkable output. She published 10 books in a five-year span, from 1969 to 1974, including the iconic novels Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing; Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great; It’s Not the End of the World; Deenie; and Blubber. In 1979, the bookstore chain B. Dalton reported that its top seven best-selling books for children were all penned by Blume. 

In Mark Oppenheimer’s breezy biography, Judy Blume: A Life, the author argues that Blume is “one of those celebrities—like Barbra Streisand, say, or Elizabeth Taylor—who was bigger than her body of work.” A magazine like People could essentially ignore Blume’s new novel, he asserts, and instead “focus on the personal life of the woman who had created it because that was what readers really wanted to know about.”  

Judy Blume: A Life by Mark
Oppenheimer, G.P. Putnam’s
Sons, 480 pp.

Oppenheimer notes that even today, 50 years after the publication of her most seminal works, Blume is revered—even mythologized—by women who came of age in the 1970s and ‘80s. While Blume wrote more than two dozen novels for audiences pre-school to adult, her iconic status arises from a handful of books that depicted with empathy the everyday concerns of adolescents, like menstruation, masturbation, bullying, romantic crushes, divorce, and depression. Oppenheimer understandably presumes that his readers, like Blume’s own devoted fans, share a deep curiosity about the woman behind the novels. 

Indeed, for a generation of middle-aged women for whom the mantra “I must, I must, I must increase my bust!” and the mere mention of the name “Ralph” still elicit giggles, this biography is a welcome sentimental journey and a chance to revisit their youthful devotion to Blume.  

And yet, in this well-researched biography, Blume’s life story lacks a certain sparkle. In comparison with Blume’s own vivid fiction, there are surprisingly few splashy anecdotes or shocking reveals. She appears to be precisely as her readers might imagine her: a perky optimist, sexy and impetuous, smart and ambitious.  

What is most striking about this biography is that Blume’s frankness in her fiction writing and deep empathy with the commonplace problems of adolescents seem to coexist with an opacity about her own personal life. Oppenheimer never explicitly acknowledges this irony: His book is awash with mildly titillating anecdotes about trivial events but surprisingly lacking in genuine introspection. In a moment of self-effacing candor, Oppenheimer writes, “What is frustrating, for the biographer, is the nagging sense that I am missing a lot.”  

At first glance, Mark Oppenheimer, a professor who has penned six previous books primarily focused on the American Jewish experience, is a surprising choice to write the life story of Blume, whose fiction was squarely aimed at adolescent girls. Nonetheless, Oppenheimer is a longtime Blume fan who reread her books over and over as a child. In 1997, Oppenheimer wrote an essay for The New York Times Book Review praising Blume’s work and analyzing her enduring influence. As in that essay, Judy Blume is at its most successful when Oppenheimer puts aside questions of “who,” and instead asks “why”—departing from personal narrative to place Blume within her historical context, celebrate her contribution to the literary canon, and explore her lasting popularity. 

The broad details of Blume’s life are widely known: She was born in 1938 to a secular Jewish middle-class family in suburban New Jersey. She trained to be a teacher but married young. As a bored housewife with two small children and a failing marriage, she tried her hand at various enterprises, including felt art and songwriting, before enrolling in a night school writing course. After two years churning out dead-end drafts—she first styled herself after Dr. Seuss—she published her first children’s book in 1969. Blume’s aggressive publication schedule, along with her accessibility to readers, helped fuel her success. Her release of 14 books in a decade “made reading Judy, for teenagers in the 1970s, not just a rite of passage but a habit,” Oppenheimer writes, and it established “Judy Blume books” and Blume herself as a marketable brand. 

Blume’s meteoric rise was fueled by her remarkable output. Between 1969 to 1974, she published 10 books. In 1979, the bookstore chain B. Dalton reported that its top seven best-selling books for children were all penned by Blume.

The People spread in 1978 marked a transition in Blume’s career and in her private life. Although Blume denied that Wifey was autobiographical, the novel, which followed the sexual exploits of a bored suburban housewife, reflected transformations in her own relationships. Three years earlier she had left her 16-year marriage to wed a stranger she had flirted with while traveling with her adolescent children on a transcontinental flight. Blume’s own sexual liberation fueled her writing. “I was wild,” she later recalled. “My fantasies were wild.” Within a year, Wifey had sold 2.7 million copies and she had divorced Tom, the man she’d met on the plane, and moved in with George Cooper, who would become her third husband. Beginning in the 1980s, Blume concentrated on adult fiction and less controversial, humorous children’s books aimed at a younger audience, moving away from the realistic adolescent fiction that had fueled her initial success. 

While professional accomplishments came relatively easily, Blume weathered ample turbulence in her private life: Her beloved father died less than a month before her first wedding; she suffered two unhappy marriages before meeting Cooper, her partner of 45 years; and both she and her husband battled cancer.  

Blume’s empathetic novels earned her the deep devotion of readers. For tween girls in the 1970s and ’80s, Judy Blume was like a knowledgeable older sister or a cool mom, willing to discuss the mortifying facts of adolescence as natural parts of growing up. Interviewers often commented on Blume’s petite stature and youthful appearance, as if she were somehow an adult in the body of a teen. Blume quipped that she had an “almost total recall of [her] childhood,” which she used to summon the awkward, confusing, and even shameful feelings of adolescence, and reflect those experiences back on her readers, allowing them to feel seen.  

Blume’s accessibility, both perceived and actual, was extraordinary. She tirelessly marketed her books and delighted in meeting her young readers, becoming one of the first children’s authors to have a true fan following. At the peak of her popularity, Blume received more than 2,000 letters a month from young people, many of whom sought personal advice on issues ranging from the mundane concerns of adolescence to more grave problems such as drugs, depression, alcoholism, suicide, and incest. Oppenheimer notes that Blume came to believe she possessed a sort of “superpower: a kind of quasi-professional expertise in parent/child communication.” This is surprising considering the emotionally distant relationship Blume had with her mother, and, later, Blume’s tensions with her own teenage children (dynamics that Oppenheimer alludes to but never fully explores in the biography).  

Over her long career, Blume wrote 29 books and sold more than 90 million worldwide, according to her website. Her banner sales benefited from two trends in publishing: the proliferation of chain bookstores in shopping malls like the now-defunct B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, and the creation of mass-market paperbacks, including new imprints designed for the children’s market. Together, these developments made children’s books more affordable and accessible to kids.  

Blume also benefited from the emergence of a new literary category, young adult (YA) fiction, and a new literary style, realism, pioneered in the 1960s and exemplified by S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and Paul Zindel’s The Pigman. Frank depictions of sexuality, abortion, addiction, and mental illness had long existed in adult fiction, but the expansion of these mature themes to an explicitly teenage audience was new.  

Blume adapted the new realism to books aimed at a younger audience and tackled subject matter less gritty than that of YA authors. Librarians hailed the emergence of realism in literature for young people and praised Blume’s books in particular. In comparison with the violence, nihilism, and explicit sexuality in the YA market, Oppenheimer writes, “Judy’s books were a safer, less radical alternative to what was out there.” Even critics, who tended to be lukewarm in their reviews, often cited Blume’s books’ social value even as they decried their literary merit. Considering Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, a New York Times reviewer wrote, “It’s evident [Blume’s] appeal goes beyond sexual frankness. She must be conveying a certain emotional reality that children recognize as true.” 

Still, the explicit sexuality in some of Blume’s books—particularly those aimed at teenage readers—caused controversy (while simultaneously spurring sales). Astonishingly, more than 50 years after publication, Blume’s iconic novel Forever…, with its frank depiction of sexually active teens, remains on PEN America’s “Most Banned Books” list. Skirmishes surrounding Blume’s books emboldened her to become an outspoken activist against censorship, a cause she continues to champion today. 

Blume’s sexual liberation fueled her writing. “I was wild,” she recalled. “My fantasies were wild.” Within a year, Wifey, which followed the sexual exploits of a bored suburban housewife, and which Blume denied was autobiographical, had sold 2.7 million copies.

But while traditionalists attacked Blume for her depictions of teen sexuality, puberty, and amoral nihilism—as her characters rarely faced consequences for behaviors ranging from lying to pre-marital sex—she drew criticism from the left as well.  

Blume’s books are virtually free of political turmoil, despite having been written during an era of enormous social change. With the exception of her novel Iggie’s House, which explored racism from the viewpoint of a young white narrator, Blume’s books make virtually no mention of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, feminism, Watergate, or the Cold War. Oppenheimer points out that her books contain few characters of color, or who are gay, religious, southern, or foreign.  

Perhaps that’s not surprising. In the formative years of her career, during the turbulent 1960s and ‘70s, Blume was writing in suburban New Jersey, far from the counterculture. But this perspective was more than just Blume’s lack of exposure; it reflected her conviction that books need not teach lessons but could instead simply reflect readers’ reality, and Blume’s own. In Blume’s novels, families are imperfect, and teenagers are casually cruel, occasionally delinquent, and sexually curious. Blume commented, “To me, not all families are great, and not all children grow up among families that are not sexist and not racist, so I am reflecting that as I knew it in my own life.”  

By 21st century standards, it is striking how limited her female characters are. The sexual revolution had spurred Blume to leave her first marriage (“I wanted to be free. I wanted to sleep with whoever I wanted to sleep with. I wanted all those sixties things that I missed”), and inspired her bawdy adult novels, Wifey and Smart Women. But the political aspect of the women’s movement is largely absent in her writings. A 1976 editorial noted that of all her many heroines, “not one fights the feminist fight—that is, struggles consciously to change the second-class status of her girlhood.” 

While Judy Blume is not an authorized biography, Oppenheimer had generous cooperation from his subject, now 88 years old and living in Key West, where she and her husband own an independent bookstore. Blume, her family members, colleagues, and friends sat for more than one hundred interviews, and she shared her notes from an unfinished memoir. Oppenheimer also had access to Blume’s voluminous archive.   

And yet, even with such generous access, the biography feels curiously light. At times, it appears as though Oppenheimer may have deferred to his subject, omitting or eliding sensitive topics. For example, the author treats certain seemingly pivotal events only in passing, like Blume’s brief period of infidelity at the end of her first marriage, and also her cancer diagnosis and mastectomy, dispensing with each in a single paragraph. 

But in a biography with a living, cooperating subject, one must ask if the fault lies with Blume herself, whom her son once described to a journalist as “the least analytical person” he had ever met. Tellingly, Blume described a foray into non-fiction, Letters to Judy: What Kids Wish They Could Tell You, as “the most difficult writing experience” of her life. Oppenheimer notes that the book is essentially a memoir, punctuated with readers’ letters. “Yet as a memoir, Letters to Judy pulls many punches,” Oppenheimer opines, “changing names, foreshortening anecdotes, focusing on the upside, offering the kind of morality tales that she would never allow herself in her fiction.”  

The reader wonders whether Blume herself is an unreliable narrator. Certainly there are honest, even startling disclosures in the biography, like Blume’s recollections of mutual masturbation at childhood slumber parties, her bouts with sexually transmitted diseases, and a matter-of-fact mention of two abortions. Others—like a particularly cringey passage Blume wrote for an early draft of Wifey involving oral sex and a pet dog, which her editor asked her to remove—seem to be included for sheer shock value. It is perhaps unsurprising that an author who built her reputation in part on her inclusion of socially taboo content for young readers should share similar disclosures from her own life. Nevertheless, the biography lacks the emotional depth and introspection readers might expect from Blume.  

For tween girls in the 1970s and ’80s, Judy Blume was like a knowledgeable older sister or a cool mom, willing to discuss the mortifying facts of adolescence as natural parts of growing up.

This tendency may stem from a childhood in which Blume’s parents were comfortable speaking about sexuality and puberty, but not about feelings. Oppenheimer comments, “Judy had a tendency to avoid her emotions, to keep the messiness at bay.” In a particularly poignant passage, Blume recalled that her mother had warned her not to cry at her father’s funeral: “We’re not going to give anybody a show here.” Blume does not remember her mother ever speaking of her father again after that day. “She was grieving,” Blume recalled. “But she was a private person, she couldn’t show it.” 

As a result, perhaps, whole swaths of Blume’s personal story feel underdeveloped. This is particularly so with respect to Blume’s familial relationships. Oppenheimer reflects, “Judy is a wife, mother, and a grandmother, but I do not, despite my best efforts, understand what kind of wife, mother, and grandmother she has been.” It is not clear, for example, what caused the collapse of Blume’s second marriage, the mere existence of which she rarely acknowledged in press interviews after it ended. “Even today,” Oppenheimer writes, “Judy mostly refrains from speaking ill of her ex-husbands; she is conflicted about how to talk about them.” Likewise, while Blume refers obliquely to challenging periods in her children’s teenage years, few specific incidents are described. Despite the full cooperation of his subject, her husband, and her children, Oppenheimer rues, “their internal family dynamics are opaque to me.” 

Upon completion of this biography, Oppenheimer shared a draft with his subject. In response, Blume sent him over 100 pages of comments—many of which Oppenheimer says he ignored—prompting the author to ponder “why she didn’t just write an autobiography.” The answer seems apparent: She couldn’t. Ironically, the author who was able to channel the inner feelings of adolescents and write unflinchingly about their most awkward, mortifying experiences seemingly struggled to tell her own story.  

The post Are You There, Judy? appeared first on Washington Monthly.