“Judy Blume: A Life” and the Problem of Biography
“Why her?” the journalist Mark Oppenheimer writes toward the end of his first biography, “Judy Blume: A Life.” “What is it about Judy and her work that won her so many millions of fans?” Partly talent, he offers, and timing: the iconic children’s author, whose twenty-nine books have sold more than ninety million copies, took off during the seventies, an era “when young readers had more autonomy, when cheap paperbacks, in mall stores, made more books available to them, and when progressive librarians were keen to stock books for them.” She was also meeting a need that had not otherwise been acknowledged, or not in the right way. In Oppenheimer’s view, Blume pioneered and popularized a new genre: “realism for young people.” With the gentle authority of someone in the know, she normalized what seemed harrowing (bodily functions, friendship drama); promised excitement and adventure (first kisses, driver’s licenses, a whole world of adult secrets); and wrote honestly about disappointment.
Oppenheimer, a longtime Blume buff, tested out his “children’s realism” theory of her appeal in a Times article, “Why Judy Blume Endures,” that was published in 1997, shortly after he’d graduated from college. Blume liked the piece, and they struck up an acquaintance. He embarked on a career as a writer and religious-studies scholar. (His previous book, “Squirrel Hill,” explores the aftermath of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting.) In 2022, Blume agreed to let him write her biography—not an authorized one, exactly, but one fed by extensive interviews with her and her circle as well as by notes that she’d compiled for her own scrapped memoir. On March 8th, two days before the book’s release, the Times reported that Blume and Oppenheimer had fallen out over “Judy Blume: A Life,” which Blume is not promoting. (Both Blume and Oppenheimer declined to comment for this article.) As the journalist Elisabeth Egan writes, Blume withdrew her support after Oppenheimer had already spoken to more than a hundred people and composed a first draft, at which point she voiced her objections, sending him a marked-up version of the document he’d given her along with a forty-page memo expressing a “constellation of concerns.” He incorporated many, though not all, of her edits and proceeded to publish the book. “The two have barely been in touch since,” Egan writes.
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Blume might have probed this kind of opaque friendship breakup in one of her novels. But fans of schoolyard intrigue (and thus literary scandal) will be disappointed by the biography’s respectful sense of duty toward its subject. If anything, Oppenheimer can be overly besotted. “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” feels “of a moment with the confessional poetry of writers like Robert Lowell and John Berryman,” he writes. (Elsewhere, he levels about what he views as the shortcomings of Blume’s early work—“ ‘Freckle Juice’ is pleasant but inert.”) He himself has noted the incongruity of a man in his fifties serving as the biographer of the patron saint of getting your period. But his lucid, sensitive evocations of Blume’s suburban girlhood should put the question of his ability to rest. (I did laugh at his perfunctory reconstruction of Blume’s first days as a new mom: “Judy bottle-fed Randy, rocked her to sleep, changed her diapers, comforted her when she cried.”)
The most compelling parts of the new biography concern Blume’s early life. Her mother, Essie, encouraged her to read a wide array of books, and her father, Rudy, “validated his daughter’s creative, adventurous side,” Oppenheimer writes. The Jewish and middle-class Sussman household—Rudy was a dentist and Essie, a homemaker—was sexually progressive and nonchalant about bodies. Blume would shower with her father and her older brother, David. She told Oppenheimer, “I never got bad messages about sex, that sex was dirty.”
At the same time, the biography gestures at what remained unspoken and inadmissible in Blume’s childhood. Though supportive, Rudy could fly into rages. Essie, a perfectionist, had strict expectations about her daughter’s future (college; marriage to a respectably employed, upwardly mobile man; children). Oppenheimer describes Blume’s early years as “Holocaust-haunted” and shadowed by the “serial deaths” of her father’s six siblings, none of whom lived past sixty. Blume was superstitious about Rudy’s health; like the fictional Margaret, she’d petition God in her head, bargaining for more time with her dad. In one of the most affecting stretches in the biography, Oppenheimer recounts how Rudy died prematurely of a heart attack less than a month before Blume’s wedding. Blume held his hand at the end while her more avoidant, buttoned-up mother retired upstairs.
Rudy once told his daughter that “charm” was the “most important five-letter word in the English language.” “If Daddy wants me to have it,” Blume resolved, “I will.” At school, her liveliness and charisma drew other kids in. She developed a big, bookish friend group that changed shape and composition over the years, not without drama. (Blume and her friend Ronne, a member of a club called Pre-Teen Kittens, which became the model for the Pre-Teen Sensations in “Margaret,” feuded over the snobbery of Ronne’s mother.) Oppenheimer describes Blume and her pals holding court in their high-school cafeteria: “the lunch table was the school in microcosm, a site of maximal silliness and admirable studiousness—girls being their fullest selves.” By contrast, Blume’s older brother David was the problem sibling: “a peculiar child, a source of frustration to his parents,” who may have “had a diagnosis” growing up today, yet was labelled simply “ ‘troubled’ or ‘difficult’ ” in the nineteen-forties. “He could build anything . . . beautiful creations, really,” Blume told Oppenheimer. While she rode her bike or saw friends, David would tinker on his projects in the basement. But if life “was easy for me, it was hard for him,” Blume said. “My job was to be happy, to make up for my older brother, who wasn’t.”
As a kid, Blume suffered from eczema—she called it gazeema—the first in a lifelong series of mysterious reactions and ailments, many of which she assumed were anxiety-related. “I was so anxious to please, it hurt,” she wrote in 1995. “I told my parents only what I thought they wanted to hear. I kept everything else to myself. I played my role well, but it took its toll. My rashes were famous all over town.” In a 2015 profile in the Times, Blume discussed her most recent book, “In the Unlikely Event,” which is based on a national news story from her childhood. In the early nineteen-fifties, three planes crashed in her home town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in a span of about two months. She marvelled to the profile writer, Susan Dominus, that she never visited the sites as a girl, nor could she remember how she’d felt about the tragedies. “Was I scared?” Blume wondered. “I could not remember. It must have been buried.”
When Blume started writing, the market category of young-adult (as opposed to children’s) literature was defined by politically motivated novels that took up social issues, such as drugs and teen pregnancy—“problem novels,” Oppenheimer calls them, using the terminology of the time. Blume didn’t write “problem novels,” he stresses. He quotes her in an interview, somewhat indignant, discussing how librarians spoke of “ ‘Judy Blume’s Book About Menstruation,’ or her ‘Book About Wet Dreams,’ or her ‘Book About Masturbation.’ ” “I don’t think of them as problems,” Blume said, when the interviewer suggested that each of her books “selects and deals with a particular problem or experience.” After all, many people engage in self-pleasure; many women get their periods; many boys have ejaculated in their sleep. Blume’s fiction addressed what was ordinary but largely invisible, describing it with humor, warmth, and care. “The truth was, Judy was more interested in unvarnished depictions of children’s normal lives than in imparting any outside drama,” Oppenheimer writes. She wanted to make people feel less alone, to provide what he calls a “pleasurable shock of recognition.” He also quotes her saying that “you write from within, you write what you feel.” Blume found a way to reconcile these motives—she exposed inner sensations that resonated with broad swaths of readers, becoming the bard of what was simultaneously unspoken and generic. She gave us a road map for the most universal things that nobody talked about.
Oppenheimer sees Blume’s emphasis on the everydayness of sex as crucial to her allure. She wrote in the wake of the sixties counterculture, publishing her first novels around the time that “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was drawing sex and body positivity into the mainstream. Her popularity stemmed from kids’ desire to read about puberty, he underlines, but also from their parents’ growing willingness to expose them to such literature. There was “a common misconception that her books scandalized readers (or, rather, their parents),” he writes. “While it’s true that her works have been challenged more than almost anyone’s (in part because they are extremely popular, so tend to draw fire), to focus on the would-be censors is to obscure the far greater number of adults for whom Judy’s books were a safer, less radical alternative to what was out there.” The menstruation scenes in “Margaret” reframe one of puberty’s gorier, freakier transformations as both ordinary and aspirational—aspirational because it is ordinary. Oppenheimer quotes Blume on finally entering her own menarche, at fourteen: “I feel like I’m the luckiest girl alive. It’s not so much that I’m a woman, as that I’m normal.”
Blume made growing up less alienating for her readers, but there were limits to her project of destigmatization. Her books, while mainly politically progressive, tended to center the bystander, not the severely bullied girl (as in “Blubber,” about a kid whose classmate is teased about her weight); the white neighbor, not the Black family (as in “Iggie’s House”); the kid whose friend gets up to no good, not the troublemaker himself (as in “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t,” where the main character covers for a shoplifting peer). She didn’t merely shy away from drugs and gang violence—the salacious stuff of “The Outsiders,” by S. E. Hinton, or of “Go Ask Alice”—she also largely steered clear of unlovely specifics about the Jewish community she came from. Her protagonists are materially comfortable, with adequate friends and sufficiently supportive parents; they’re quirky and complex, but they’d never star in a “problem novel.”
Oppenheimer derisively quotes an editorial, from 1976, in the Interracial Books for Children Bulletin, claiming that Blume upholds “traditional sex roles” and fails to create heroines “who want to take new, assertive, out-front postures on life.” The editorial, he argues, instrumentalizes artists by demanding that they “promote justice” and “offer role models.” If the biography has a critical failing, it’s that it brushes aside this critique of Blume’s work: that she was not boundary-pushing enough, content to redefine what counted as a regular childhood, shift its borders around, but not abolish it. Oppenheimer lauds Blume for offering readers an unadorned image of themselves and their lives, but Blume didn’t become America’s mom, as she’s been dubbed—a guiding figure for Molly Ringwald, Lena Dunham, Jenna Bush Hager, and tens of millions of girls and women—by representing the facts of childhood and adolescence with a grown-up ambiguity. She did it by portraying those facts—from underarm hair to girls being teased about their weight—as reassuringly typical.
The biography’s admiring stance toward its subject doesn’t preclude material that Blume herself might have bristled at: there are candid discussions of the two abortions she had while married to her second husband, Tom Kitchens, including a breezy letter to a friend. (“I hadn’t worried in fifteen years . . . maybe that’s why I got caught!”) There are discrepancies between Blume’s and others’ accounts of delicate situations, such as the erotically exploratory all-girl sleepovers she went on as a kid, and whether she encouraged her seventh-grade clique to ostracize her friend Ronne, the one with the snobbish mother. At one point, Oppenheimer writes that Blume “colluded” in her own infantilizing press coverage; elsewhere, he describes a scene, cut from her adult novel “Wifey,” in which a dog performs oral sex on the main character.
Toward the end of the biography, Oppenheimer notes that Blume seemingly struggled with how to portray her first husband, at one point objecting to a draft he’d shown her because it painted him in too positive a light. Later, she entreated Oppenheimer not to “change him from a saint (your first draft) to an ogre. Like all humans, he was complicated. And he is the father of my children.” There’s a ticklish elusiveness to the portraits of Blume’s husbands in the book, and to those of her kids, Randy and Larry, as well. Oppenheimer alludes to tensions among Blume and the children, but writes regretfully that their “internal family dynamics are opaque to me.” When mother, son, and daughter were being interviewed, he explains, they wanted to protect one another, “as loving families do.”
But it’s hard to pin the breach on any one thing. None of the revelations feels especially explosive. Easier, maybe, to imagine Blume rejecting the general proposition of an author biography, which seeks to root a subject’s work in their specific experiences, dislodging them from a supposedly neutral or unmarked position. If a writer’s novels present the parts of her that she is willing to show, a biographer’s job is to recover what has been swept out of sight: those vivid, occasionally unsettling details that isolate and define her, and that risk placing her beyond the pale. A family is always a bit of a fantasy, requiring some realist puncturing. Every good biographer, then, is a problem child, and every good biography a “problem book.” ♦