A month after Judy Blume’s 88th birthday (she’s an Aquarius - humanitarian, creative, aloof) I am sitting on my bed surrounded by her early books, the Piccolo editions I can never walk past at the op shop. To this constellation I have added the new biography, Judy Blume - a Life, by Mark Oppenheimer, journalist, literary historian and long-time Judy stan. “What have I missed?” Oppenheimer asks in his epilogue. Not much, I think. The biography is the size of a house-brick. I’ve been lugging it from place to place, gripping it with both hands, like a sun-reflector, like a kettle-bell. It traces Blume’s life, from her middle-class Jewish “Holocaust-haunted” New Jersey girlhood, through three marriages (the last was a keeper), two children, booksales over 90 million, her early adoption of technology, deals, merch, and unrealized forays into film, coming to the full bloom of Blume as activist, bookshop owner, and all around good human.
In an interview (with himself) for Oldster, Oppenheimer suggests that the book effectively depicts a century of American life, from 1950s repression to the advances of womens and LGBTQI rights to current political boomeranging. Blume hasn’t published a book since her adult novel In the Unlikely Event in 2015, but she has remained a public figure, venerated by younger taste-makers (Lena Dunham, Molly Ringwald), reinvigorated by the 2023 film adaptation of Are You There God it’s Me, Margaret and documentary Judy Blume Forever. For me, a Gen X-er who cut her teeth on 1970s realist teen fiction, reading her biography was a confrontation with the weight of years, what the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows calls “zenosyne”: the quiet compression of time, the sense that it’s accelerating as you grow older. “Life is short - and life is long. But not in that order.” But once I got past that, I found it compelling, especially the first half that tracks Blume’s childhood as a big reader, daydreamer, and people-pleaser, anxiously afflicted by her ‘gazeema’ (eczema). Her transformation from suburban housewife, scrawling while the kids are at school, to her apprenticeship under Lee Wyndham, her near misses then joyous connection with editor Dick Jackson has all the fist-pumping momentum of a success montage in a movie biopic. If later sections sometimes felt boggy or laundry-listy, I was already invested. In the end, the reading experience became compulsive, echoing my child-self reader, which feels apropos.
It was Blume who approached Oppenheimer about writing the book, getting in contact during COVID. (“The email was a surprise, a delightful surprise.” ) They had been in sporadic touch since 1997, after his piece, Why Judy Blume Endures, was published and she invited him to lunch at her home in Martha’s Vineyard. Blume was not uninvolved in the ‘hunting and gathering’ phase of writing. Oppenheimer drew on interviews with Blume and those close to her, as well as the memoir she had abandoned work on in the 1980s, and the daunting raft of correspondence between the author and fans, editors, peers, parents, movie-people, gatekeepers and glommer-onners.
Biographies are supposed to be comprehensive. To take out the negative and leave only glow would make it disingenuous, a hagiography. And, of course, people are multi-faceted. We have all seen what can happen when children’s authors are put on a pedestal. While there are no nasty skeletons here, there are what Katy Waldman in the New York Times called “vivid unsettling particulars”. When Oppenhemer shared his early draft with Blume, she responded with a lengthy letter of suggestions, concerns and edits. He conceded to some, and rejected others. His focus fell on “the daily life of the subject: her childhood, her marriages, her children, plus how she balanced her time as a writer against other commitments, like her political work on censorship.
Oppenheimer’s respect and admiration for Blume is evident throughout, but when I read that Blume had distanced herself from the book, and was not providing any commentary on it, I could understand why. I’m not sure I needed to know when she had her tubes tied, or other choices relating to her body. Reportage of the mismatched memories regarding early sexual experimentation with her best friend feels prurient, as does the telling of a salacious scene cut from Wifey, her first adult novel, (“Pure fiction,” Oppeheimer qualifies, “Judy never even owned a dog.”) Regarding Wifey: publicity saw Blume posing in a negligee in People magazine. (Fellow children’s author Norma Klein wrote to her in response, “When I saw that terrible photo of you in People, dressed in the nightgown with the shy, frightened smile on your face, I practically wanted to cry.”) I did like reading that Blume’s first husband blamed Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying for the demise of their marriage. Ultimately, I wondered what a female biographer might have homed in on, and left out.
Oppenheimer’s attention to Blume’s dedication to the “business” of writing, that is, “everything that went along with writing that wasn’t writing itself” is illuminating. At the height of her fame, Blume was receiving over 2000 letters a month (her aim was to answer 100 personally). Many were from young fans disclosing harm, suicidal ideation and sexual abuse. Blume’s duty of care went well beyond the page. In 1981, she established The Kids Fund, providing grants to organizations to improve communication between parents and children. Proceeds from The Judy Blume Diary were funnelled into the charity. Letters to Judy, her 1986 agony-aunt-style non-fiction, ostensibly for kids, was an early step towards battling challenges to books. “I think a lot of censorship is based on fear …” she told the Post. “… my child is going to come to me with questions and I don’t want to face those questions.”
Back to me on my bed, with my books, I’m reading here and there, indulging in bibliomancy. I’m looking at Deenie. I’m looking at Blubber. The young characters on the covers are so finely drawn you can see all the hope and doubt of their age in their eyes; you can see their flyaway hair and the biscuit crumbs on their jumpers and the creases in their jeans. The books are thin - under two hundred pages, and the language is direct and unadorned. As a child, when I read them, I would put my own self on ice and inhabit these other selves even when they were bullies, or vain, or naive. J.M Sommers argued that Judy Blume took the 19th century avuncular novel and recast it as a “sororic dialogic”: “The reader finds herself diverted from her own reality by escaping into an offered invitation into someone else’s problems (whom they can relate to). The effect is that the young women reading Blume’s work feel, in many ways, as if they are active participants in the protagonist’s healing process as much as vice versa.”
Oppenheimer admits that the one question he can’t answer is, “Why Judy?”: “Other realists (or ‘problem novelists’, to use the unfortunate term) like Paul Zindel or Norma Klein, wrote as much, but they did not become celebrities.” Was it timing or luck or personality? Was it craft - witchcraft! Was it owing to Blumes “total recall”, as her title pages claim in those freefall novels - the ten she wrote in the five years from 1975-1980? Personally, I think it was because her books took on the role of companion for readers in a lonely, liminal time. ”Suppose there aren’t any more A+ days once you get to be twelve?” Karen asks in It’s Not the End of The World. I think of Bachelard writing, “Childhood is greater than reality”, how Blume’s books not only hinted at things to come, they gently showed that a complicated life was also a life fully lived. Oppenheimer’s biography, in all its all-ness, suggests the same.
This was first published in the Age Spectrum, March 28/2026
See also:
Judy Blume is the Patron Saint of Teen Girl Readers so Why Did a Man Writer her Biography? by Penni Russon. Penni and I are friends, unbeknownst to each other we were both writing about the book at the same time - I love that we had the same instinctive response to the man-writing factor. Her point about menstruation representation in popular fiction at the time is so true - scarred by the ‘Plug it up’ tampon-hurling popular girls in Carrie.
Wonderful, Simmone. Thank you for this delightful and deeply thoughtful review.
I so loved her books, especially Deenie. There seemed so relatively few books like hers, then. Thanks for this illuminating review.