Judy Blume knew us intimately, better than we knew ourselves

For decades, Judy Blume was the ‘confidante’ of teenage girls, writing frankly about their feelings. She will visit Ireland next month to talk about her uncanny empathy, her career and her new novel for adults, says Susan Dominus.

I read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, when I was 10, hidden, as usual, in a big upholstered chair in a back corner of the house. In one of my favourite scenes, a sixth-grader named Nancy is mad at her friend, Gretchen, who has had her first period.

Nancy thinks Gretchen is not sharing the details, despite a predetermined pact that whoever got hers first would tell the others “absolutely everything”.

“I’m telling you, aren’t I?” Gretchen asked. “Not enough,” Nancy said.

“What’s it feel like?” What’s it feel like? With that question, Judy Blume, the book’s author, was reflecting back her readers’ impatient curiosity about the world ahead, and promising, implicitly, that she would fill them in.

When I opened one of Blume’s books — Blubber, Deenie, Forever .?.?. — I felt confident that she understood the pact: Blume had gotten there first, and she would tell us everything.

Blume wrote about playground bullying and unnerving body changes and teenage sex, and she wrote about parents’ failings.

If her characters differed from my friends and me, it was that they could utter out loud their thoughts about subjects that were, to us, indescribably uncomfortable.

Her books did not resolve with tidy, happy endings, so I read them with the same mixture of overheated expectation and anxiety that I felt about adolescence itself.

Occasionally, I was exasperated — could these girls stop obsessing about their bust size already? — but often, as I read, I felt a shock of recognition: wait, she knew that too? “I could never meet Judy Blume,” a 45-year-old friend told me recently.

“She would just look at me and know all my secrets.”

For those of us who were teenagers in the early 1980s and in the decade before — Are You There God? was published in 1970 — there was no internet; there was just Judy Blume, planting the radical idea, for generations of women, that their bodies would be, should be, a source of pleasure and not of shame.

Her credibility was total, a young person’s raw perspective, filtered — subtly — through the common sense of a frank, funny woman.

The connection to that woman felt personal. Although we knew nothing about her, beyond her smiling face on the backs of the books, she knew us intimately, better than we knew ourselves.

When adult women meet Blume now, they are giddy; or they burst into tears, as if reuniting with someone they had not known they had missed. Blume, who is 77, has met many overwrought fans, and has tried to understand what they are feeling in those moments. “It’s because of what I represent,” she tells them.

“I’m your childhood.” On a recent evening in Key West, where Judy Blume now lives much of the year, she was enjoying music at a piano bar at a beachside restaurant near her home. Key West — uninhibited, lush, with a strong literary history — suits Blume.

A writer friend of Blume’s, the poet John Malcolm Brinnin, once said that living in Key West was like being back in childhood.

“You ride your bike,” Blume told me the next morning, recalling his description. “You hang out with your friends. You take a nap.”

In Florida, Blume is never far from her youth: she spent two school years, starting at age eight, living in Miami Beach, the setting for her most autobiographical novel, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. That morning, Blume, in a pink baseball cap and sneakers, was taking her daily two-mile walk on a path that snakes along the beach.

At 8am, the sun was already strong, but the more Blume talked, the faster she walked, and the conversation turned to her new book, In the Unlikely Event, which will be published next month. It is set mainly in 1952, when Blume was 14.

Blume hadn’t written a book about the 1950s. She mines the details of her youth, but had never set a novel in that decade, when she hit adolescence, because it bored her.

“The ’50s were all about being happy,” she said. “Parents’ expectations were, ‘Don’t rock the boat, and be happy, for God’s sake’. There was a lot of pretending going on.”

Blume also never intended to write another adult novel. She published her third, Summer Sisters, a 1998 best- seller, when she was 60.

“After that,” Blume told me, “I said, ‘I’m never doing this again.’?” She had written 20 drafts of Summer Sisters, and then pushed herself through a multi-city book tour.

Blume, who says flying is hard on her sinuses and who is phobic about thunder and nervous about germs, wrote a blog, ‘Judy’s Anxiety Diary,’ while she was promoting the book. It was not that she did not care about being asked about the book, it was that she cared too much.

When the book was finished, Blume decided that rather than go through all that again, she would enjoy her life in Key West — her funny, calm husband, George Cooper; her crossword puzzles by the pool in their backyard; her work on the board of the Key West Literary Seminar.

From her relaxed vantage point on a tropical island, Blume supported the National Coalition Against Censorship; her books, especially Deenie, Blubber and Forever .?.?., are among those most frequently banned from school libraries.

Blume keeps busy, and she decided she had written plenty of books. Are You There God? still sells 100,000 copies a year, and her books for younger readers — Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Double Fudge — sell at least as well.

But then, in 2009, Blume was attending a literary event in Key West, listening to Rachel Kushner, onstage, talking about her own book, Telex from Cuba. Kushner said the novel had been inspired by her mother’s stories from the ’50s. And, suddenly, a story swooped down on Blume. In two terrible months, three planes had crashed in Blume’s hometown, Elizabeth, N.J.

The first, in December, 1951, plummeted into a river, on a Sunday, less than two blocks from Blume’s junior high school, its parts landing on a tree-lined suburban street. The second plowed into a building just feet from the all-girls public high school Blume would later attend. A third missed an orphanage on its way to smashing into a playing field. All told, 116 people died.

Blume had built a career on the basis of her pristine recollections of childhood emotions, yet she had no memory of how she had felt about national news stories that had happened in her own backyard.

“Was I scared?” Blume said. “I could not remember. It must have been buried.”

As a girl, Blume had terrible eczema, and, as a young mother in the ’60s, then living in Scotch Plains, N.J., she was bedridden with a mysterious illness that left her feverish and splotchy for months, and weak for a year.

When that marriage ended after 16 years, she quickly remarried, coming down with a wedding-day allergy attack so severe her eyes were swollen shut.

“I knew it was a mistake,” she said. That marriage lasted four years.

In so many of Blume’s books, her characters’ bodies insist on their inherent, primal messiness; they crave, they ooze, break out in rashes as strange and humiliating as desire itself.

The body is reckless, but telling. In Wifey, her first adult novel, published in 1978, Sandy, a miserably stifled housewife in search of sexual adventure, develops hives and fever.

On the first page of Are You There God?, the young narrator says that she knew what the weather was like from the second she woke up, “because I caught my mother sniffing under her arms”.

Growing up in Elizabeth in the 1950s, Blume was that kind of girl: observant, curious, forever noting the mysterious ways of adults. She fantasised about being a detective with a gun, a cowgirl on a horse, a famous movie star with a Latin lover. She spent hours throwing a ball against the wall and concocting private melodramas.

“I loved keeping my stories secret,” Blume said.

“Because everybody was keeping so many secrets from me. You just knew. Adults. You would walk into a room and they would just stop. And it was like: “What? What?What’?”

Blume has three children — her daughter, Randy Blume, 54, who is a therapist in Boston; her son, Lawrence Blume, 51, who is a filmmaker and an entrepreneur in New York; and her stepdaughter, Amanda Cooper, 47, who is a political consultant in New Mexico. When Randy and Lawrence were toddlers, Blume followed her mother’s model of selfless parenting.

“She told me to polish the children’s shoes and wash their laces every day while they’re napping,” she said.

“And, guess what? I did, until I started to question it.”

In frustration, she threw things — her hairbrush, a phone — against the living-room walls of her home, which became pockmarked with dents. She was unhappy in her marriage, bored by the requisite golf games and, above all, restless; she wanted to do more than play the wife.

Wifey, which had autobiographical details about that phase of her life, was controversial. A beloved children’s book author had dared to write about a young mother’s explicit — “gooey,” one reviewer said — sexual fantasies and adventures.

“Some people thought Wifey would end my career,” Blume has written in a foreword to the book. Sandy, the heroine of Wifey, tried to escape her circumstances through fantasy. Blume escaped her marriage by asserting herself through writing.

She took a class about writing for children, which led to her first novel, Iggie’s House, about a young white girl who befriends black children new to her all-white neighbourhood. Before that book was published, in 1970, she had started on Are You There God?

Blume is warm and open, but she says that her son has called her “the least analytical person he has ever met”.

She has no theories, for example, to explain why she, of all people, felt unburdened by the unspoken rules that mark certain subjects off limits for children, or why she has that ability to recall the emotional experiences of adolescence, the confusion, the longing, the rivalries — the memories that most of us bury as quickly and deeply as we can.

Blume turned to children’s fiction because she was still living a sheltered life.

“I didn’t have any adult experience when I started to write,” she said. “So I identified more with kids.” Her own fate felt sealed, airless. “I felt, I made this decision. This is it. It’s not all open for me anymore.”

So she looked backward, to the age when she had felt most powerful and adulthood had still promised the adventures her father had wanted for her.

She had been a fierce and creative child; on the page, at least, she still was. Blume likes the idea that everybody has an age that defined them for life. For her, she said, that age was 12.

In Key West, Blume is friendly with Meg Cabot, the young-adult author best known for the Princess Diaries series, who grew up reading Blume’s work. Their friendship has moved beyond a mentor-student role, because Blume prefers it that way.

“I’ll be like, Judy, however did you write that masterpiece, Blubber?” Cabot said. “And she’ll be like, ‘Who do you get to trim your palm fronds, because mine are driving me crazy.’

With us, it’s all island gossip and landscaping.” Cabot was one of 24 women who contributed to a 2007 celebratory anthology of Blume’s work. It was called, Everything I Need to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume.

In 2007, on one of his video blogs, John Green, author of the best-selling The Fault in Our Stars, said he had a massive crush on Blume. When I emailed him about Blume, he called me within a minute.

Green describes Forever .?.?. — about a loving, sexual relationship between two 17-year-olds — “as a hugely important book in the history of literature for teenagers.” It was not just that she wrote about sex, which was groundbreaking, but that she reframed a cultural conception of it.

“I have a radically feminist mother, and so I was always taught that sexuality was, you know, good,” Green said.

“But there’s so many messages out there that sex is something that men do to women. It’s so hard not to internalise that. Forever .?.?. was a very different way of thinking about sex.”

The two lovers are not caught or humiliated. The girl, Katherine, does not become pregnant, nor is she slut-shamed by her peers. Nothing happens, except that she and her boyfriend, Michael, eventually break up, with rancour, but none of it fatal, after Katherine meets someone else who seems very nice.

“A contemporary book like that, for young adults, may well exist,” said Lizzie Skurnick, who wrote Shelf Discovery, a 2009 book of essays about young-adult literature. “But I haven’t seen it.”

Carolyn Mackler, author of the young-adult novel, The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, said she thought about Forever .?.?. as she sat down to write a scene for a new book in which a young man has sex for the first time. “She just wrote it organically, in a way that was true to her characters,” Mackler said.

“Her novels made me want to write the most honest teenage characters I can.”

Blume still receives 1,000 letters and emails a month, mostly from children and teenagers who read her work, and she responds with personal notes when she can. Since 2009, she has been a chatty, accessible presence on Twitter. In 2012, when she found out she had breast cancer (for which she was successfully treated), she tweeted about it.

In In the Unlikely Event, a young Greek woman is in love with a young Irishman whom her mother would never accept.

The scene in which they sleep together for the first time is one of the book’s best, a steamy stream-of-consciousness narration that gets at the surreal dreaminess of sex, the way the imagination either ignores or makes use of whatever else is happening in the room to heighten the experience.

In Key West, Blume said that she had written another charged section, about an affair between two characters who were middle-aged. She cut it, because the female character, she decided, would not have made that choice.

It seemed like a lost opportunity; having read Blume’s novels about teenage sexuality when I was an adolescent, I now wanted to read her writing about the sex lives of people who are no longer young. “What you need to do, Judy, is write about people having sex in their 70s,” Cooper said.

Blume wanted to stop by the places where the planes had crashed all those years ago: a field, a river, an ice cream shop that had replaced the building that was there before the second accident. Each spot was silent, revealing nothing about what had happened there.

Blume thought that in researching the book, memories of the crashes would come back to her, but they didn’t. She still does not know why, at the time, she didn’t look at the wreckage.

“I know I never went down to see the site,” she said, standing in the shade near the Elizabeth River, where the first plane fell from the sky.

“Even though my school was less than two blocks away. I find that very strange.”

She had, however, uncovered what she said would be her last adult novel. And she had discovered something else: The ’50s were not that boring.

“All of these things that were going on underneath that the children didn’t know, now, as an adult, I can know,” she said, and smiled with the power of it. “Or I can make it up.”

Judy Blume will appear at the Pavillion Theatre, Dublin, on July 19 www.paviliontheatre.ie