We need Judy Blume now more than ever

It seems a little bizarre to talk about how great it is to see Judy Blume back in the public eye again. For some of us she never left. Her books have remained in our hearts and on our shelves, passed down to our kids, or to our friends, or to our friends’ kids. With the new documentary Judy Blume Forever just released on Prime Video and the first adaptation of her seminal middle-grade novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret opening in theaters on April 28, her fanbase, already legion, will surely grow even larger. The timing couldn’t be better.

It’s hard for me, and I’m sure many adults who grew up reading her books, to talk about Judy Blume without getting emotional. She opened doors from our solitary bedrooms into a wider world of girls just like us, letting us know we weren’t alone and that everything we were going through (let’s just call it what it was: puberty) was healthy and normal. These books were a rite of passage for me, and so many others. Long before society started using the term viral to describe anything but a biological pathogen, Blume’s books were going viral, spreading from girl to girl, class to class, school to school. By the time my mother got around to giving me the “birds and the bees” talk, I already knew all the basics—thanks to Judy.

There’s a bit of Margaret in all of us

For the uninitiated, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a great entry point into Blume’s work and what makes it special. Published in 1970, it was her breakthrough novel, and remains one of her best. It tells the story of an 11-year-old, half-Jewish, half-Christian girl from New Jersey who wonders about religion, bras, and when she’s going to get her period like the rest of her friends. You don’t have to be anything like Margaret to understand what she’s going through. Although she’s a very specific character, her problems are universal (for boys as well as girls, according to Blume herself).

Various filmmakers and studios have been interested in adapting the book over the years, but Blume was understandably protective of her most beloved story. It took 53 years for her to come across a filmmaker she could trust to get it right. That filmmaker was Kelly Fremon Craig, who previously wrote and directed another coming-of-age tale, The Edge Of Seventeen. Craig reached out to Blume in writing and poured her heart out (as many readers have done over the years), making the case that she should be the one to adapt Margaret. It worked. Blume has said in interviews promoting the film that not only is she pleased with how it turned out, she thinks it might be even better than the book. That’s reassuring for fans who have been waiting to see Margaret (now portrayed by Abby Ryder Fortson) on the big screen, as well as newcomers about to meet her for the first time.

From advocate to activist

Blume, who is still very active at the age of 85 and owns her own bookstore in Key West, Florida, has written 29 books in total. They’ve sold 90 million copies and been translated into 32 languages. Many of them have been banned. After deconstructing the mysteries of puberty in Margaret, she tackled bullying in Blubber, sibling resentment in Tales Of A Fourth Grade Nothing, grief after the loss of a parent in Tiger Eyes, teen romance in Forever… (the ellipses are important!), and parental pressure in Deenie.

The last two books in particular became lightning rods for controversy because of the frank way they presented teen sexuality. In Deenie, a 13-year-old girl with scoliosis wrestles with her mother’s high expectations of her, and finds comfort in self pleasure. In Forever… a couple of high school seniors begin a relationship and have sex for the first time, without suffering any tragic consequences or regret. This was practically unheard of when the book was first published in 1975. Blume didn’t intend to start a revolution; she was just fulfilling her daughter’s wish for a book in which “teenagers who fall in love and do it, and nobody has to die.”

There’s a section in Judy Blume Forever that addresses the author’s history with censorship, dating all the way back to the Reagan era. Inspired by the so-called “moral majority,” parents and showboating politicians came out of the woodwork, putting pressure on schools and libraries to ban her books for daring to tell the honest truth about the interior lives of girls. In a clip from a televised debate on the show Crossfire in 1984, Pat Buchanan grills her about her preoccupation with masturbation in Deenie. “There is no preoccupation with it,” she retorts, smiling tightly and quietly seething in the polite way girls of her age were taught to do. “Did you read the whole book or did you just read the pages that were paper clipped?”

The more things change…

The conversation, and newspaper articles, and the footage of parents objecting to Blume’s books in front of school boards decades ago, feel eerily familiar today. It’s happening all over again, and Blume is still on the front lines. With Judy Blume Forever and Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret coming out just a week apart, Blume has been making the rounds to promote them. She’s used that platform to speak out against the new wave of censorship and book banning across the country. She’s taken special aim at the governor of Florida, where she currently resides.

Blume also found herself in the middle of a more recent controversy over a reported quote in which she seemed to express support of J.K. Rowling, the infamously anti-trans author of the Harry Potter series. Blume later explained that the quote was taken out of context. “I stand with the trans community and vehemently disagree with anyone who does not fully support equality and acceptance for LGBTQIA+ people,” she wrote in a post on Twitter. She clarified that she was identifying with the ordeal as someone who has been the subject of online harassment herself (in the documentary she says that she once received 700 death threats in one day). Trans folks, who have been subjected to worse harassment recently, will have to decide for themselves if this explanation is adequate.

Timeless stories that are also timely

As award-winning author Jason Reynolds puts it in the documentary, “I don’t think Judy Blume wrote her books to be timeless. I think she wrote her books to be timely. And they were so timely that they became timeless.”

Because she wrote mainly for children, specifically girls, Blume’s contributions are often overlooked, but I am not exaggerating when I say that I believe that she belongs in the pantheon of celebrated authors whose work has shaped modern literature as we know it. If you love reading YA fiction, thank Judy Blume for blazing the trail. I hope that these new films will inspire a new generation of young people to discover her, and her work. I hope some of them will go to the public library in my home town and check out the same dog-eared copy of Forever… that I once did. (And if it’s a brand new copy, you’ll find the good stuff on page 85.)