Did we need a biography of Judy Blume? After all, the great lady of children’s literature has already been the subject of several documentaries, and, crucially, is still alive and kicking. Indeed, she is perfectly capable of telling her own story: some might even say she already has through her game-changing books for children and teenagers. Her most recent work of adult fiction, In the Unlikely Event, has as its central protagonist a postwar dentist’s daughter in New Jersey, just like Judy herself. Other indelible characters, God-gabbing Margaret amongst them, are surely also inspired by personal experience.
Nevertheless, tell her story is what author Mark Oppenheimer has chosen to do, and tell it he does, in exhaustive detail. No letter or conversation is too trivial. Pages are devoted to spats with childhood friends Blume never saw again in adulthood and to her middle-class Jewish childhood growing up in suburban New Jersey. He dissects Blume’s extensive publishing career, the breakdown of her first marriage, to John Blume, a lawyer, with whom she had two children, her brief disastrous second to the physicist Tom Kitchens (her third husband is the writer George Cooper) and the complex relationship she had with her troubled older brother, David.
Yet for all the detail, the result too often feels like a sanitised version of Blume. This is all the more ironic given Blume gave her prepubescent readers the unvarnished truth about sex, relationships, body image and the chaos of adolescence and adulthood through YA classics such as 1970’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and 1975’s Forever.
Before reading, I discovered that Blume had reportedly fallen out with Oppenheimer because he failed to make her suggested amendments. Perhaps a deeper collaboration would have felt less removed from its subject, or even uncovered some unknown stories. Despite all this, avid fans (myself included) will welcome Oppenheimer’s positioning of Blume as not merely a ground-breaking children’s writer, but one with a fair claim to being part of the American Jewish literary canon.
Blume is no Roth or Mailer and Oppenheimer doesn’t pretend she ever was, but crucially she wrote about a moment in which Jews intermarried, assimilated, or at the very least threw off their immigrant past.
Margaret goes to synagogue with her grandmother but marks Christmas too. Sally, one of my favourite Blume creations and the eponymous protagonist of Starring Sally J Friedman as Herself (1977), set in post-war Miami, becomes convinced an old man is Hitler.
Like other American Jews of the time who had relatives murdered in the Holocaust, Sally is struggling to reconcile her freedom with their trauma.
And as Oppenheimer shows, she was an absolute trailblazer. Divorcing her first husband just as her career took off, she defied expectations of a New Jersey Jewish housewife with a string of taboo-busting books that defined teenage angst for generations (almost every girl who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s knows Ralph). Moreover, she continued in the face of establishment disdain and sometimes downright condemnation. Her critics mostly didn’t get her books, the publishing industry wanted her to be a writer either for children or adults but not both, while the moral crusaders banned her for covering no-consequence teenage sex, periods, obesity, racial integration and more.
What emerges from this lovingly delivered portrait is a writer who knew her audience, cared deeply about not patronising them, and in her own quiet way transformed what reading could offer young people.
Judy Blume: A Life, by Mark Oppenheimer, is published by Scribe
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