Judy Blume is the patron saint of teen girl readers – so why did a man write her biography?
- Written by Penni Russon, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Monash University
I’m Generation X, so of course I was raised by Judy Blume, the patron saint of teen girl readers from the 1970s on, with her frank, funny realist novels on everything from first periods to first sexual encounters.
I’m a children’s writer, so of course I reached for her books to help me parent my own children.
And when my now 20-year-old daughter sees my copy of Judy Blume: A Life lying on our kitchen counter, she says, horrified, “Why is a man writing Judy Blume’s biography?”
Review: Judy Blume: A Life – Mark Oppenheimer (Scribe)
In 1997, Mark Oppenheimer wrote an article defending Judy Blume from those who wanted to dismiss her books as “trivial and second rate”. Blume saw it, contacted him and an occasional correspondence sprang up between them.
When he first suggested writing her biography, sometime in the 2010s, she turned him down. At that point, she was interested in writing her own memoir. But in 2022, she emailed to tell him she had changed her mind and, he says, asked him to tell her story.
Blume sent back the first draft he provided her with “hundreds” of comments in the margins and a 40-page memo, he told the New York Times. He “took some” of her suggestions, “rejected others and fixed the errors she had caught”. They have “barely been in touch” since. Blume is not promoting the memoir, subtitled: “A Life”.
Is “life” a sequence of key events? Or is this the great fiction of biography? The “felt facts” of Blume’s life lurk in her novels: something I found myself reflecting on often as I read, trying to catch a glimpse of the Judy Blume I feel I know intimately.
Introducing Judy
Blume was born in 1938 in New Jersey. Her parents were both the children of Jewish immigrants. By the time Blume was a child, they had entered the nouveau middle class.
She grew up a reader and a social child. Her older brother David was a loner inclined to illness, who liked to tinker in his basement. They spent some of their childhood in Florida, back in the day when the sickly might be prescribed a stint in the warm weather.
If you read Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, Blume’s most autobiographical novel, set in 1947, following a Jewish American family in the immediate aftermath of World War II, all of this will sound familiar.
Like her alter ego, Sally, Blume had a close relationship with her father, Rudy, a dentist. Like Sally, she was terrified that this man, who cared about her imaginative life and encouraged her to take creative and emotional risks, would die young like his brothers. Sally’s mother was prone to anxiety, and so was Blume’s.
Blume’s father survived her childhood, but only barely. When she was 21, a month before her wedding and just before her senior year of college, Rudy died of a heart attack. Blume wanted to put off the ceremony, but it was considered bad luck to change the date.
First marriage and a career
In her novels, Blume has an extraordinary gift for enlivening a child’s mind, and colouring in their moods. But Oppenheimer shows more skill in recounting her adult years than her childhood.
Her first marriage was stultifying. By the time she graduated NYU in 1960, she was a newly married mother. She framed her diploma and her Founder’s Day award and hung them over the washing machine to remind herself she was an intelligent, educated person. Soon after, in 1963, her second child, Larry, joined his sister, Randy.
It was in this atmosphere that Blume was driven to write. “A creative person with no outlet is in real danger of falling apart,” she told an early audience at a conference for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in 1977.
Oppenheimer shares her early attempts at writing for children. The early manuscripts are rhyming picture books which, though clumsy, rehearse some of the themes she’ll later be known for: families and friendships, lessons about belonging and acceptance.
He documents the slow and painstaking apprenticeship as she moves rapidly through this “practising” phase, finding mentors and experimenting with different styles and older characters.
Her first books, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo (1969) and Iggie’s House (1970), about neighbourhood prejudice and interracial friendships, were published to mixed reception.
An early cover of Tiger Eyes.
Amazon
I know more about this period in Santa Fe from Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes (1981) than I do from Oppenheimer’s biography. Tiger Eyes is the story of Davey, who moves with her mother and brother from Atlantic City to New Mexico in the aftermath of her father’s violent death, because Davey’s mother is unable to cope with the overwhelming loss.
Blume’s grief for her father, which she carried into her first marriage, is inseparable from the grief for not one, but two failed marriages. The consolations of the beauty of the landscape can be inferred through Tiger Eyes, but Oppenheimer doesn’t place Blume – or me as the reader – in this landscape.
In the heady times of the 70s and 80s, against a backdrop of women’s liberation and sexual awakening, Blume realises – after the occasional infidelity, and a period of dating – that, at heart, she is deeply monogamous. Enter George Cooper, a fellow writer. A blind date in December 1979 led to marriage number three in 1987. Blume found happiness. Perhaps as a result, her writing productivity slowed.
The last part of the book gives a lot of attention to both successful and thwarted adaptations of Blume’s books into film and television. Here, I admit my interest flagged again. I was waiting for the opening of her bookshop, Books & Books, which I knew about from her social media. Oppenheimer briefly mentions its opening in Key West, Florida in 2016. Later, he alludes to the challenges of running a bookstore during COVID.
But he was less interested in this career move – the harboured dream of every children’s author I know – than I was.
The last part of the book pays much attention to film adaptations, like Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?. Blume is pictured with cast members Abby Ryder Fortson (left) and Rachel McAdams (right).
AAP
Invisible biographers
A biography is a feat of engineering as much as anything.
Oppenheimer draws together an impressive range of sources, including Blume’s notes towards an unpublished memoir of her childhood. He interviewed Blume, her family, friends and colleagues. He read published articles and interviews, and a vast archive of letters and other printed material. Onto these disparate sources, he must impose a chronology of key events.
He tries hard to stay out of the way. When recounting a possible in-fight between friends, he brushes away the differing recollections with comments about memory and the passage of time.
When Blume’s childhood friend suggests Blume had excluded another girl in their friendship group, Blume insists they had all just drifted apart. Oppenheimer, like a benevolent father, valiantly offers both sides while remaining neutral, though one suspects he has an opinion.
This can be a characteristic of the genre. Patrick White’s biographer David Marr wrote in The Monthly:
I’m on the side of invisible biographers. I don’t give a damn about their happy thoughts as they tread in the footsteps of their subjects […] I’m not interested in their research triumphs. I want the life, not the homework.
Channelling teen girlhood
I found myself increasingly suspicious of Oppenheimer’s apparent journalistic neutrality. Oppenheimer claims to be a childhood fan of Blume: “When I was eleven,” he tells us in the acknowledgements, “the only author I reread was Judy Blume.”
However, he is quite dismissive at times of the style and substance of her novels. Towards the end, I audibly gasped when he called Forever – her 1975 novel for older teens about a realistically intense first sexual relationship and a rite of passage for many teenage readers – a “lesser book”.
Does it matter that Blume’s memoir was written by a man? I think it does. While a minority of her books have male protagonists, her most loved titles (with the exception of the Fudge series, about an ordinary boy’s eccentric little brother) are deeply about the embodied experience of being a girl.
Margaret was one of two menstruating characters most of us encountered in novels during my 80s childhood and adolescence. The other was Stephen King’s Carrie, in which the period becomes a spectacle of shame, representing the abjection of teenage girls.
Oppenheimer attributes Blume’s success to her pioneering of a new genre: “realism for young people”. But it was so much more than that. Blume gives us unfettered access to the private thoughts, feelings, worries and hopes of her young characters as they navigate the stuff of life: divorce, periods, grief, sex, moving house, masturbation, social exclusion.
I wouldn’t say I saw myself in all of Blume’s characters. But I knew what it felt like to be Sally J. Freedman, and Margaret. And that helped me know what it felt like to be me.
‘What have I missed?’
At the end of the biography, Oppenheimer steps into the frame, a rare self-insert. “What have I missed?” he asks the reader, before answering:
A good biographer shares less than he knows […] My job is to offer one plausible, but selective, account of the subject’s life.
It’s possible this note is conciliatory, or self-protective.
I grieve the unpublished memoir of Judy Blume. I retain a small hope that her disenchantment with the process of someone else writing her biography inspires her to take charge of her own story once more.
But perhaps she doesn’t need to. Having read Mark Oppenheimer’s “Life”, I’m inspired to reread her entire oeuvre, starting from the beginning – to relive her childhood and adolescence, and my own.
Authors: Penni Russon, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Monash University
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