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Today we’re celebrating a new book about an American icon: Judy Blume.
It’s written by Mark Oppenheimer—who, before all this, was my Unorthodox podcast co-host, where we spent week after week talking about Jewish life, Jewish books, and Jewish culture. It’s a universe where Judy Blume looms large.
Now in Judy Blume: A Life, Mark takes us beyond the books we grew up with, tracing Blume’s Jewish upbringing in suburban New Jersey, her sometimes messy personal life, and her unlikely path to becoming a wildly successful and beloved author. Judy Blume shaped how so many of us understand ourselves. It’s a treat to finally learn all about her.
I called Mark to congratulate him on the book and to learn more about what it’s like to write a biography of a literary legend. And whether you’re a Judy Blume completist or missed her books the first time around, Mark also shared his list of Five Judy Blume Books You Shouldn’t Miss.
I remember when you got word from Judy Blume that she wanted you to write this book, way back in 2022. Tell us how it happened…
I'd been pestering her off and on over the years. I told her I’d love to write her biography and she had always sort of put me off, saying she wasn’t ready to have a biography written about her yet. And then I got this email out of the blue basically saying, “let's talk.”
I'm sure I immediately texted you and said, “Judy Blume just emailed me.” And here we are. The book is out. Crazy.
What do you think made you the anointed one?
I had written a piece about her back in 1997 when I was right out of college that she had liked. That was what sparked our relationship, and then we were very sort of loose correspondents. Every few years, one of us would send the other one a note or an email thereafter. I think I just planted my flag early.
Honestly, I never asked her. I never said “Why me?” By the way, there may be more biographies of her someday and that would be great. I think important writers deserve more than one biography. This is the first.
So you get the go ahead from her, you're in. What happens next?
There are biographies that are written by biographers who get no access. There was a great biography of the comic legend Elaine May by Carrie Courogen, who was granted zero access. She just used the public record. In the case of Judy Blume, she had donated 130 boxes of her papers to the Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale, which is about two miles from my house. They're open to the public, though there are certain restrictions on them. You can’t name anyone who was a minor when they wrote a letter to Judy, and there are a lot of letters from fans written when the fans were 11 or 12. Of course I respect those restrictions, but aside from that, they're quotable, they're usable. Anyone can go visit those archives. Plus, there have been numerous profiles of her written over the years. So one could write a good biography without her help.
But what having her help did mean was that she gave me lots of interviews, her husband gave me interviews, her children gave me interviews, and when I reached out to friends and old colleagues of hers, I think she mostly said “sure, talk to him.”
It's not an authorized biography. She didn't have any right to censor it. She did look at a draft and offered feedback, which was great. It really improved the book. But ultimately, the editorial choices were always mine. So really what it meant was she agreed to be interviewed for a while. That definitely made it a better book, but it could have been written anyway.
What was your formative Judy Blume experience? Was there a book, or a moment?
I would say I first got my hands on a Judy Blume book when I was eight or nine years old. I was a bookish kid, but I wasn’t actually a super voracious reader. I didn't want to read The Lord of the Rings, I didn't want to read Narnia. I found Narnia totally scary. I wanted normal-person problems solved by normal people, and Judy Blume was writing realism for young people. So once I found one Judy book, I really liked them. Then I pretty quickly owned and reread the classic books that she wrote in five years from about 1970 to 1975: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., Then Again, Maybe I Won't, Deenie, Blubber, It's Not the End of the World, Superfudge, and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.
I don't think I talked about them with anyone, and I don't think I wrote book reports on them. I just had them on my bookshelf underneath my New York Yankees posters and pennants and read and reread them.
Did a young you ever imagine you would write her biography someday?
No. I mean, I thought I would be a writer, but mostly I wanted to be an actor. But then once I realized I couldn't be an actor, I realized I had to be a writer. And somehow at the age of 22, I got it in mind to write this essay about her that was published in The New York Times Book Review. It kind of was my breakthrough piece that Judy saw and liked. That probably set the stage for this.
What I love about this book is that it goes so deep into her life. I think we tend to think of Judy Blume as this universal figure. She explained adolescence to all of us, wherever we were born, wherever we lived. But for how universal we see her as, her story is a deeply Jewish one, and it's rooted in a very distinct universe: 1930s and 1940s suburban New Jersey, where she grew up as Judith Sussman. This deeply informs her work, right?
Judy’s books are very Jewishly flavored. Margaret Simon, for example, is a daughter of intermarriage. Her dad is Jewish, and she goes on a kind of hunt to figure out her own spirituality.
Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself is a highly autobiographical book about a Jewish girl right after the Holocaust who thinks she spots Hitler on park benches. She has morbid fantasies about Hitler having survived and moved to Miami Beach. Judy also thought of some of her other characters as Jewish. I think she has said Deenie is Jewish, but she also sometimes thought of characters as Jewish who were not explicitly Jewish. And of course, these stories are principally set in the greater New York, suburban Jersey Jewish milieu.
She has sold more than 90 million books, by some estimates, and I make the argument that she's the best-selling Jewish woman author ever.
So is she a Jewish author to you? I know that’s such a loaded, annoying question.
If you asked me to sort of plant my flag, I would say yes, because I think it would be crazy to have a category of Jewish author that didn't include her, even though she's not dealing with Jewishness as much as some of the others.
That said, like any good artist, she resists being categorized. She doesn't want to be known as just a young people's author, just a YA author, or just a Jewish author. She’s a writer. She wrote the stories that came to her.
But also, her books were probably how a lot of young people were first interacting with Jewish characters.
Totally. There have to have been millions of gentiles who encountered Judaism through Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
Last week, The New York Times published a great piece about you and this book. It features a picture of you sitting on one of your daughter's bunk beds—it's peak Mark Oppenheimer, it captured you perfectly. But it also does say that Judy is not participating in any promotion of this book. Was that a surprise? It sort of comes off as like, this is the book Judy Blume doesn't want you to read.
I will never put words in her mouth, and I actually don't even know if she read the final product. It was always our agreement that I would show her a draft. She wrote back an amazing set of notes, many of which I took. Either I got something clearly wrong and she caught it or my interpretation was off, or I was missing context that she gave me, or she expanded a story. It was amazing. It was such a gift.
That was the relationship, and I never expected her to be my publicist or to be speaking on behalf of the book. It’s my book, and it was always clear between us that the final editorial product would be mine. Obviously, I want everyone to love the book and I want that from her as well, but I didn't expect her to be on tour with me.
Mark, I'm so proud of you and this book, Judy Blume: A Life. Thank you for taking the time to chat about it.
Stephanie and GOLDA, the honor is all mine.
After years of researching and reporting this book, Mark is the ultimate JB expert. Below he shares which books of hers you shouldn’t miss:
This is Blume’s most autobiographical book: like her main character, Sally, Blume really did relocate with her mom and brother, for two years after World War II, to Miami Beach, where she beached. It’s a poignant, evocative period piece that should definitely be the next Blume novel made into a movie.
Blume’s first book for adults is a steamy, smutty tale of adultery and cuckoldry that some feared would sink her career as a children’s writer (it didn’t). Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s so bad it’s good. It introduced millions of readers to the term “c*** vinaigrette.”
Still a classic story of young love and mutually consenting teen sex. Also, if nobody ever names another boy “Ralph,” it will live on as the penis’s nickname in this book.
I love this YA novel about divorce in part because it features one of Blume’s only bookish characters, a neighbor girl who reads the whole Sunday New York Times cover to cover every week.
Okay, it’s an obvious pick, but one of my favorite discoveries in writing Blume’s biography was that the episode of Fudge swallowing the turtle was based on the real-life case of Utah boy Brad Haines, whose turtle ingestion made national news in 1968. (BTW, I couldn’t find Haines—I hereby offer a special prize to anyone reading this who tracks down the right Brad Haines.)
GOLDA may earn a few shekels from any purchases made through links in this article.
Thanks to Mark for sharing his Judy Blume wisdom. You can buy the book here. While you’re at it, order the book we wrote together!
Stay GOLDA,
Stephanie