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JUDY BLUME
By Caleb NeelonPhotos By Travis Roozze
Whenever author Judy Blume visits a group of kids, she says, “someone-and it’s always been a boy-will ask me, ‘So how much do you make?’” With an astonishing 75 million-plus books in print, it does beg the question, though you might have to be a nine-year-old boy to have the gumption to ask it. Judy Blume has been puberty’s bartender since the early 1970s, an understanding confidante in an age when everything felt unusual and everyone weird. Today, she divides her time between Manhattan, Key West, and Martha’s Vineyard, and in the interest of immediately assuaging any fears concerning the Author in Real Life, rest assured that Judy is just as warm, open, and caring as you’d hoped.
Blume so positively exudes gentleness and understanding that it’s hard to imagine that she’s one of the most censored and banned authors of the past century. But there are many well organized parents out there that have a really hard time with her or anyone else who discusses life issues with their children, especially when they do it in an especially skillful, natural, and non-judgmental manner.
Not that Blume knew exactly what she was getting herself into when she began to write. “I certainly had no expectations in the beginning-none! I had a lot of fantasies, but my fantasies were, Please, please, please let somebody publish what I write-and then, Please, please, please let somebody read it. They were very simple fantasies. I was very naive. I just didn’t know anything when I began to write, and that worked in my favor. Failure wasn’t on my mind because I was getting all these rejections. When you know too much, it’s bad. It’s so much better when you don’t have those expectations.”
In the early ‘70s, Blume’s first hit book, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, featured a group of girls who talked eagerly about getting their periods. She followed it with Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, with a boy full of newfound sexuality. Then came Deenie, in which the protagonist is a beautiful 13-year-old girl who is diagnosed with scoliosis and must wear a large brace. In the book, Blume ever-so-delicately relates Deenie’s discovery of her “special place” and how touching it made Deenie get that “good feeling.” Because of this, Deenie has been banned more than any of her other books, and every so often in a classroom visit, Blume says she gets to squirm when a youngster asks her, “Where is Deenie’s ‘special place?’” In 1975, she published Forever, her first work for young adults. The subject, as many of you will vividly recall, was sex: sex for the first time, and what happens afterwards. All of this plain-English growing up in print gave those queasy parents reason enough to organize their first bans of Judy Blume’s books from schools and libraries.
Still, there’s no book market more winner-take-all than children’s, and Blume was clearly a favorite, bans or no bans. As she remembers, “Success was very slow and very sweet, and I never really thought much about it. Now, unfortunately, you think about it, because I think, Well, can I do it again?” In the ‘70s, as well, there wasn’t the same sophistication of advertising that there is today when it comes to the young people. “It was all word of mouth from the kids, since at that time I don’t think they’d figured out how to market books to kids.”
Blume’s books faced a few bans in the ‘70s, but as she explains, “With the election of Reagan, like the next day-the American Library Association would tell you-the censorship effort quadrupled. And it just kept growing, growing, growing, growing, and today it’s still the same-but there’s a big difference. Publishers ran really scared in the 1980s. Now what I see, and I guess this is good news, is that it’s a business, and publishers aren’t scared anymore. Today, there is another way to get books directly to kids, and to have kids buy the books. So I’m seeing a whole lot of YA (young adult) books that are just full of all kinds of stuff that they never would have touched in the 1980s and 1990s. And I see that as positive. These books probably won’t make it into the school libraries Ð they’ll make it into the public libraries, but not the school libraries. But they’ll be in the bookstores and kids will find them.” Just like they’ll find their special places.