writing bestselling books. She opens a bookstore. She receives accolades. It’s all necessary to mention to demon- strate her cultural significance, but less thrilling to the reader than the bit where she parlays two semesters of weekly creative writing night school into a breakout literary success.
to her eventual accomplishments. A realist trend in fiction (not the first such wave) was migrating to youth literature as Blume came on the scene, including frank discussions of sex, bodies, and family relationships. She was writing accessible fiction at a moment when it was suddenly possi- ble to buy paperback books at mall bookstores, giving eas- ier access to kids looking for reading material. She tapped into, and anticipated, 1970s feminism. Her timing—itself a mix of wisdom and fortune—was impeccable. But some of Blume’s accomplishments are due to her own talents and idiosyncrasies. At peak productivity, she was writing multiple books at a time, each at various stages of the publishing process. She also seems, from day one, not to have felt held back by a sense that she didn’t belong in the big leagues. It did not occur to her to aim low before getting her work to publishers. This speaks to to her ascent predating the rise of MFA programs and unpaid internships, sure, but also to chutzpah. It’s fun to read about Blume’s own adolescence, her ear- liest sexual experiences and intense friendships, given
JUDY BLUME: AN ARTIST
CONTRARY TO WHAT I’D ASSUMED, Blume was not particularly controversial in the early 1970s when she started publishing her bestsellers. It was only a decade on, with the rise of the Christian right in the US, that her books encountered much prudish criticism. Others who were fine with her work were not cool with it being marketed as chil- dren’s literature. These experiences would lead to Blume becoming an advocate for free expression.
BLUME IS NOT JUST A WORLD-FAMOUS, BESTSELLING, AND BELOVED NOVELIST. SHE’S ALSO A GREAT ARTIST, AS WELL AS AN ADULT WHO’S LED A FULL, COMPLICATED LIFE AND MERITS CONSIDERATION AS SUCH.
For different reasons, there was also pushback from pro- gressives. Feminist readers sometimes objected to the de- pictions of fat-shaming and cliquishness, which could be more realist than didactic. Blume was taken to task for having not done a book about the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as though she were a vending machine for content on worthy topics, and not a fiction writer with finite creative scope. Even the flattering coverage could be flattening. Cor- porate types asked her to help them sell training bras and menstrual products. (She once gave in, writing the market- ing copy for some pads.) The pop-feminist reclamation of Blume beginning in the 2010s was reductive—per Oppenheimer, and I take his point—in a less obvious way. In 2013, Lena Dunham told Blume that the show Girls was inspired by the nov- el Summer Sisters , thus retroactively anointing Blume the godmother of millennial-pink vibes. Though well past liter- al girlhood, Blume suddenly fit into the girls-centric zeit- geist. Grown-ups were looking to teen girls (or to Teen Vogue ) for political commentary. Trends kept getting the girl prefix: girl dinners, hot girl walks, girlbosses. One of the big cultural moments of 2023 was the quasi-feminist
her oeuvre. This is the rare biography that walks readers through the subject’s first menstrual period, but it sort of makes sense given Margaret . There is also an account of her final period, definitive on account of the hysterectomy that followed. These were moments when I would guess that Blume, rather than Oppenheimer, was guiding the narrative. I don’t like the thought of a biographer assuming that a novelist writing about a character’s menstruation would warrant making that novelist’s own cycles a matter of pub- lic record. But Blume presumably volunteered this infor- mation because she wanted it shared in this context. What would have struck me as overly personal in an unautho- rized biography is untroubling here. While the whole biography is impeccably done, the earlier portions, when Blume’s professional ascent is yet to occur or just getting started, are the most compelling and revelatory. By the time she is happily married to her third husband and splitting time between Martha’s Vine- yard, Manhattan, and Key West, the stakes are simply not what they’d once been. She tries to get her books turned into movies, which proves more challenging for her than
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