Judy Blume Goes All the Way
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Like tens of thousands of young women before me, I wrote to Judy Blume because something strange was happening to my body.
I had just returned from visiting the author in Key West when I noticed a line of small, bright-red bites running up my right leg. I was certain it was bedbugs—and terrified that I’d given them to Blume, whose couch I had been sitting on a few days earlier.
I figured that if the creatures had hitched a ride from my hotel room, as I suspected, the courteous—if mortifying—thing to do would be to warn Blume that some might have stowed away in her upholstery, too.
In Key West and in Brooklyn, beds were stripped, expensive inspections performed: nothing. After a few days, I had no new bites. I was relieved, if further embarrassed. I apologized to Blume for the false alarm, and she responded with a “Whew!” I hoped we had put the matter behind us.
The next morning, another email appeared in my inbox:
Amy—When I am bitten by No-See-Ums (so small you can’t even see them and you were eating on your balcony in the evening)—I get a reaction, very itchy and the bites get very red and big. They often bite in a line.
It was “just a thought,” she wrote. “xx J.”
Here was Judy Blume, the author who gave us some of American literature’s most memorable first periods, wet dreams, and desperate preteen bargains with God, calmly and empathetically letting me know that an unwelcome bodily development was nothing to be ashamed of or frightened by—that it was, in fact, something that had happened to her body too. Maybe, on some level, I’d been seeking such reassurance when I emailed her in the first place. Who better to go through a bedbug scare with?
For more than 50 years, Blume has been a beloved and trusted guide to children who are baffled or terrified or elated by what is happening to them, and are trying to make sense of it, whether it has to do with friendship, love, sex, envy, sibling rivalry, breast size (too small, too large), religion, race, class, death, or dermatology. Blume’s 29 books have sold more than 90 million copies. The New York Daily News once referred to her as “Miss Lonelyhearts, Mister Rogers and Dr. Ruth rolled into one.” In the 1980s, she received 2,000 letters every month from devoted readers. “I’m not trying to get pity,” a typical 11-year-old wrote. “What I want is someone to tell me, ‘You’ll live through this.’ I thought you could be that person.”
Blume, now 85, says that she is probably done writing, that the novel she published in 2015 was her last big book. She doesn’t get many handwritten letters anymore, though she still interacts with readers in the nonprofit bookstore that she and her husband, George Cooper, founded in Key West in 2016. Some fans, women who grew up reading Blume, cry when they meet her. “Judy, hi!” one middle-aged visitor exclaimed when I was there, as if she were greeting an old friend. She was from Scotch Plains, New Jersey, where Blume raised her two children in the ’60s and ’70s, though she admitted that the author would have no reason to know her personally. “Well hello, and welcome!” Blume said.
Blume loves meeting kids in the store too. Usually, though, she avoids making recommendations in the young-adult section—not because of the kids so much as their hovering parents. “The parents are so judgmental ” about their kids’ book choices, she told me. “They’re always, you know, ‘What is this? Let me see this.’ You want to say, ‘Leave them alone.’ ” (Key West is a tourist town, and not everyone knows they’re walking into Judy Blume’s bookstore.)
Such parental anxiety is all too familiar to Blume. In the ’80s, her frank descriptions of puberty and teenage sexuality made her a favorite target of would-be censors. Her books no longer land on the, which is now crowded with novels featuring queer and trans protagonists. Yet Blume’s titles are still the subjects of attempted bans. Last year, the Brevard County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group based in Florida, sought to have taken off public-school shelves there (the novel tells the story of two high-school seniors who fall in love, have sex, and—spoiler—do not stay together forever). Also in 2022, a Christian group in Fredericksburg, Texas, called Make Schools Safe Again targeted (it mentions masturbation).
