Judy Blume says the current spate of book banning is the worst she’s seen

Few authors alive have done more for girlhood at large than Judy Blume. Her frank but forgiving depictions of puberty, sexuality, and spirituality made books like Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.—soon to become a major motion picture starring Rachel McAdams—both time-honored tomes and targets of censorship.

Book banning is well-traveled terrain for Blume that she “thought… was over, frankly.” But in a new interview with BBC News, Blume opines that the current state of censorship, especially in America, is the direst she’s ever seen it.

“I thought we had come through that, you know, not in every way, but I never expected us to be back where we were in the 80s plus, much worse,” Blume shares. In the five-plus decades since Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. first hit shelves in 1970, it has remained a staple on the American Library Association’s running list of most frequently challenged or banned books.

Blume has said that even the local elementary school where her children studied at the time refused to shelve the book. The school’s male principal— “not a good guy for many, many reasons,” per Blume—insisted that a character study emphasizing the inner life of a sixth grader was inappropriate reading… for sixth graders.

“I came through the 80s when book banning was really at its height. And it was terrible,” Blume tells BBC. “And then libraries and schools began to get policies in place and we saw a falling off of the desire to censor books. Now it is back, it is back much worse—this is in America, it is back so much worse than it was in the 80s. Because it’s become political.”

Blume doesn’t just point to the surge in banning or modern “sensitivity edits,” which have befallen works from Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie recently. She specifically highlights a bill recently introduced into the Florida state legislature that would ban the discussion of menstruation in academic settings before sixth grade. The bill also aims to streamline and simplify the process of censoring and banning books.

To the “advocates” and politicians who have been leading the charge of book banning under the guise of protecting America’s children, Blume has one primary question: “Protect them from what?”

She continues: “Protect [kids] from talking about things? Protect them from knowing about things? Because even if they don’t let them read books, their bodies are still going to change and their feelings about their bodies are going to change. And you can’t control that. They have to be able to read, to question.”