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- [00:04]
A
It's Thursday, April 2, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca and I was listening to Face the Nation this weekend. Yes, listening. It's a podcast for me. I go double speed. 2.2, 2.3 and Jerome Adams, Jerome Michael Adams was on. He was the 20th Surgeon General of the United States, 2017 through 2021. Last day of Biden being in office and he was Talking about little RFK Jr. And the current Surgeon General has been put on hold. And he said this. When I came in, we had the opioid epidemic and an overdose crisis. Imagine if I had said, you know, as surgeon general, it's not my place to tell people to take naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal agent. They should talk to their doctor about it. And I thought, wait a minute, when you came into office, there was a crisis. I don't necessarily think that Adams is literally saying there crisis or epidemic. Now, epidemic has a little bit more of a solid definition than crisis, but not terribly solid. But I did think, wait, are we not still in if not crisis, the near crisis epidemic, ish mode. So looked up the stats and on the one hand opioid prescriptions have dropped from 260 million in 2012 when we were stupid and knew nothing. 225 million in 2024. That's good. Bunch of lawsuits against big Pharma. Did a little bit about that. But and this is from the American Medical association, they're right. While opioid related deaths drop more than 110,000 in 2023 to 75,000 last year. And this is referring to 2024. Takes about a year for these stats to come out. They do note that most are still driven by illicitly made fentanyl and 60% involve more than one dangerous substance. You know, in other words, a fentanyl lace substance. So there you have it. Here's another way to consider that statistic. This from the cdc, the age adjusted drug overdose death rate cities are all Drugs decreased from 22 to 24 with 26% occurring last year from 31.3 deaths per 100,000 standard population to 23. I don't love when the CDC age adjust is ever age adjusts everything. I just sometimes want to know how many people died deaths or deaths. You know, 65 year old may be more likely to die than a 22 year old, but they're dead still to their family. Beside the point. Talking about what Jerome Adams was saying. So we do still have this crisis, it's pretty bad. It is improving because of a number of factors, like we got a little bit smarter than and intervention, including the specific one he was talking about, got a little bit better. But also we didn't get stupider, Right. We didn't regress and start saying now, I think a little bit of opioids, a little bit of sprinkling of fentanyl will be good for you. And that's kind of what's going on with measles and vaccines. So I take that point. Even if the crisis or the epidemic should be recognized as improving, but far from this thing that's in our rearview mirror on the show today, you know, if you grew up in the 70s or the 80s or in New Jersey or were a young teenage girl or were in the suburbs and I was some of those things, you knew Judy Blume, you read Judy Blume. The novels of Judy Blume both described and outlined your life. But the definitive work on Judy Blume has not been issued until now. Mark Oppenheimer has written Judy Blume A Life. And we will also talk about what happened when Judy Blume gives you her full cooperation until a moment late in time when she doesn't. The super fudge of authors, Mark Oppenheimer. Up next, Mark Oppenheimer teaches at the John C. Danforth center and religion and politics at Wash U St. Louis. What he does there is the editor of ARC, Religion, Politics, et cetera. I read ARC all the time. I used to listen to Mark when he hosted an excellent podcast called Unorthodox. He even put me and this is one of the reasons I love Mark, put me in a book of his as an example of the pizza bagel, the half Jewish, half Italian human being. Mark has now come out with a book about an author that he has loved for most of his life. And Mark and I are almost exactly the same age. And the book Judy Bloom A Life made me realize, I don't know if I'd use the word love, but as a constant in my life, as both background and when I was immersed in one of the her novels, as maybe a fourth grade nothing myself, I've read probably more of the percentage work of Judy Blume than all but 10 other authors, or at least the percent of output she had put out when I was in seventh grade. Mark, welcome back to the gist.
- [05:27]
B
It's so good to be back. I'm really honored. Also, since you've talked with my brother on a podcast or two, I'm trying to stay ahead of him in My sort of Pesca connection.
- [05:35]
A
Yeah, we have, we have an Oppenheimer off going on.
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B
I was, I was talking to Megan Dom recently hosts a great podcast and she too had interfaced with my brother. And I was like, let's, let's be clear who Oppenheimer primae is as to the output. I mean, I, you know, before I wrote this book and had to become 100% Judy Blum completist, I'd probably read 70% of Judy, certainly 100% of what she'd written by the time I was, you know, 12.
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A
Yeah.
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B
I'm curious and I realize you're going to interview me, but I'm curious since you said all but a few authors like who. Who are you more of a completist on Michael Pesci.
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A
I think you'd have. Well, if someone has what SE Hinton probably wrote three books in her life.
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B
She wrote four, so. Okay. You and I both read her four books. Fair enough. Okay.
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A
Yeah. And I read the Harper Lee book. Right. So.
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B
Right, exactly.
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A
Once you accept for that I've read more Vonnegut because I. Huge Vonnegut head.
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B
Yep.
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A
And Updike might be up there. Notice. What I should do is say pinch on. Right. What I should do is say a very, very highbrow author. But I can't.
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B
Robert Hoover.
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A
Yes.
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B
Bartlem Red.
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A
I've also read every play of Shakespeare, but that doesn't count.
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B
Right.
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A
You know, and there was a book about Shakespeare while we get to it, where it alleged. It theorized that he invented the concept of human beings. That's interesting.
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B
But when I was Harold Bloom, right. Harold Bloom said Shakespeare gave us. He gave us personality, basically, that there wasn't, there wasn't self reflection or introspection in that sense before Shakespeare, which I think is bogus because I think.
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A
Yeah, of course it's bogus. Harold Bloom's genius. You know, sometimes you run out of things to say about Shakespeare, so you have to say he literally invented human. So I don't want to do that with Judy Blume.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But she invented, at least from our age, in our early to mid-50s, she invented a version of adolescents, or at least told so many adolescent people what it means to be adolescent. She could make the case. And you do in these 300 or so pages that it's hard to find a person with more impact on a generation than Judy Blume.
- [07:37]
B
Yeah, that's really true. And I mean we could have fun and maybe we will in a few minutes, you know, seeing who are her comps like who compares to her? Who, who, who, who else is in that ballpark? But, you know, she started publishing in 1969. She was 31 years old then. And there's a fun backstory of how she turned into an author, which was not something she aspired to be. But then in the next five years she published 10 books, all of which became classics. And, you know, you're talking about tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Are youe There God? It's Me, Margaret Blubber Dini. Then again, maybe I won't. It's not the End of the World, starring Sally J. Friedman as herself Forever, Famously in which, you know, Katherine names Michael's penis Ralph, thus spawning a generation of adolescent penises named Ralph.
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A
I think your assessment is not a great book, but a great name for a penis.
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B
Great phallic nickname. She's one of the leading phallic nicknamers of the silent generation. And she. Yeah, I mean, there certainly had been great children's literature before she was raised on a lot of it. The Oz books of L. Frank Baum, the Betsy Tacy books of Maud Hart Lovelace, obviously Frances Hodgson Burnett. The Secret Garden. There's a great British, British tradition of children's literature or young people's literature. But. But she took it very wide, very big, very mainstream. She was very prolific about it. She sold it. She was out there giving hundreds of talks. She was a kind of relentless evangelist for her own work and the work of others. And yes, her books, what I say is she really helped invent realism for young people. So you mentioned Updike a couple minutes ago. The thing that Updike, and before him, people like John o' Hara and Dos Passos and Steinbeck were doing for adults and that Jane Austen had done for. That George Eliot had done, right. Of just these sort of deeply realistic, like comedies of manners. What is life like as lived on the ground? Social relations, class relations, sexuality. She wrote it in a register that was aimed at the 9, 10, 11, 12 year old. And so there were books that had covered this stuff before, but in a grown up register. And there were books for children that hadn't covered this stuff. But she took this kind of subject matter and put it at a reading level, to be blunt, that was for young people and that was pretty innovative. And you know, she was. There were other people doing it. We mentioned S.E. hinton was the great kind of contemporary, but, you know, she. Hinton, yes, yeah, SE Hinton of the Outsiders. And you know, look, I mean, you and I are both of that generation where we Remember Walden Books, B. Dalton, things like that. In 1981 or 82, I found this in. In Judy Blume's archives. There was a photocopy of the children's top ten bestsellers in the B. Dalton chain. And seven of the ten were Judy Blume. And I think, you know, the other one rounding out the top 10 were, like, you know, one of the Chronicles of Narnia, you know, maybe one Madeline Langol, A Wrinkle in Time, and then something else. But seven of the ten were Judy Blume.
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A
Yeah, she was like Carolyn Hoover, who is good for us? So, yeah, I want to pick up
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B
a Colleen Hoover, you philistine. I can't believe you didn't even. Since you read all of her novels.
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A
Not knowing marks me as it does.
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B
It really. Like I'm. I'm. I'm the schmuck, right? That I know. That's Colleen.
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A
Oh, you know her name.
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B
Okay, so you now who wrote the Housemaid? Because I. Whoever that is, is taking over.
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A
Oh, I don't know that I'll look.
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B
Frida somebody.
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A
You mentioned her, and you mentioned in this book, her extroversion contrasted with Essie Hinton, who, as you say, most of her fans don't even know what the S stood for. It's Susan. Or if she was a man or a woman. I was thinking, since you know so much about authors, maybe this is a theory, maybe it's not a good theory. But as we established, Harold Bloom could get a not so good theory could gain wide purchase. There are diptychs with every kind of author. And there is the extroverted one. Oh, interesting introverted one. And so for every Salinger, you might have, I don't know, a Philip Roth or, I could think of a Thomas Pynchon.
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B
And it's for every update, for every update, you have, like, a richer. Actually, Cheever was way more introverted. Like. Like Updike was out there, you know, kind of famous and Achiever was, you know. Yeah, I like this. I like this.
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A
Okay.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So does the. I think probably we would say, well, the extroverted author is good at. Is good at managing their brand, is good at marketing, and Judy Blume was good at that. But did that obscure what you write about in her. In your book, about how good her writing was and how perceptive. And I think this is the important thing, how perceptive she was about the experience of young people.
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B
I don't think it obscured it. I think that the two are pretty much in alignment for the most part, that she was seen that her public Persona was as this relentless champion of seeing things from a young person's perspective. She was of course, always out there challenging attempts to ban books. She. She got very involved in the freedom to read as a. As a political movement. She would always, you know, when she would visit a school, she would really take time to get to know the children, talk to them. She loved talking to children. She loved meeting people at book signings. She kind of like. It was her fuel and, and her books gave that feeling that she knew young people, that she was an empath. And I think there was a lot of alignment there. I think that you do make a good point, which is that. But it might. That her innovativeness was probably overlooked. Let me put it this way. I think people thought her innovation was writing about sex or body image or disability or whatever. And I actually don't think that was the innovation. Other people had done that. As I said, number one, she was doing it for. In a particular vocabulary range and register for young people. But the other thing I would say is there were innovations that were not clocked at the time that I think we can look back and talk about now. So let me give you an example. Are youe There, God? It's Me, Margaret. Really interesting book. Made into a good movie pretty recently
- [14:04]
A
and people will one of the few of Judah Bloom's career, one of the
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B
very few which made it to a movie. And there's others that I think could make great movies that were never optioned and. But Margaret is a good movie. It's funny, like Forever was made into a TV movie with Stephanie Zimbablist in the early 80s, I think. And you can find scenes on YouTube and the scenes lead one to infer that it was not a good adaptation. But anyway. But Margaret, you know, is remembered for menstruation and, and breast size because she and her friends have this famous chant, we must, we must, we must increase our bust. Which is kind of a, you know, a mantra for people born in the 70s and 80s. But that's not the most interesting thing about that book. I think if you go back and reread that book, it is actually more interesting that it deals with religion and
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A
spirituality because Margaret, Christian mom, Jewish dad.
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B
Margaret is a pizza bagel. No, not a pizza bagel. That's a half Italian. Yeah, not Italian. Margaret has a sort of WASPy, whatever, Christian mom and a Jewish dad. And the mom's parents are still bitter that their daughter married a Jew and kind of snippy about it. And dad's Mother, the Jewish grandma seems to love her daughter in law, but is really interested in bringing Margaret closer to Judaism, like reeling her back in. And Margaret spends the whole book. The story arc of the book over the course of the year is described by Margaret's school project, which is to figure out what her own religion is. Because her parents said, you get to choose the famous mantra of, you know, people who have interfaith couples. Like they say to the child, you'll decide when you're old enough.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And that's hard for kids. And kids actually want some direction and want some. Some of that. And she decides to make it a project to visit synagogue with her grandma and then churches with like three different friends, like a Catholic church, a couple different Protestant churches. And the book is actually much more innovative and much more interesting on religion and spirituality. The way that, then again, maybe I won't. Which people remember for the wet dreams is actually more interesting on psychosomatic illness, anxiety. Tony has stomach pains that a psychiatrist realizes are not caused by anything physiological, but are caused by his stress and anxiety for various things going on. So there's always the kind of like surface level, sensationalist. Oh, it's breasts. Oh, it's wet dreams. And then when you dig a little bit deeper, there's something more interesting going on that maybe wasn't clocked at the time.
- [16:37]
A
Right. And Judy had rashes that were famous in her neighborhood. I think you document. And Judy was a pleaser. And Judy was bargained with God a lot because her dad was. It wasn't that he was in poor health. It just the whole family, or his whole side of the family dropped dead before 60. And that's actually what happened to him.
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B
He was the third brother who was a dentist, who died young, like in his 50s. It was crazy. It was just so sad. And she was feared this was what was gonna happen to him. She feared that what happened to his two older brothers would happen to him. She bargained with God. She pray, if I'm a good girl, will you keep him alive? And then he died a couple weeks before her wedding. When she was 20, right? 21, hearing heartbreaking stuff.
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A
Her mom upstairs, unable to deal with it. Essentially, she in the next room, hearing him being told, breathe, just breathe.
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B
Yeah, yeah. It's a downer. It's so sad.
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A
So the question of. And this is late in the book, and I think, tell me if I'm right. Her husband is the one who says, you need to crack the code on why her. Was that right?
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B
Yeah, yeah. Cause that's a huge question.
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A
Why her? Why Judy Blume? And insofar as here is the biographical material that lines up with the written material, we understand, and here is her psychology now we understand. But that phenomenon, that ability that had never been seen before, everything for a certain period that she put her name on as an author sold so much more than every other book of its genre. Some of the why her has to do with structural reasons, malls and paperback and things like that. But then there is the question. I think it's great that it's always a debatable, ineffable question out there, why her? I have some theories, but what theories do you bring to it that go beyond what I laid out already?
- [18:40]
B
Yeah, well, I want your theories in a minute because as you say, I haven't cracked the code. I was, yes, I was down there in Key West. I'd been interviewing Judy for several, a bunch of hours over a couple days, and at one point her third husband, George Cooper, who is the husband, who, who is the love of her life, they've been together since about 1980 and, and they adore each other. It's very, very much a love match. Third time's the charm. Takes me aside, says, you know, what's interesting is like, why her? Can you, can you get to the bottom of why her? I mean, he, he adores her and, and maybe idolizes or idealizes her as she does him. And I think he quite smartly realizes I don't, you know, I don't know what's great about her because I just, I'm in love with her. Right? The way that, you know, my mom always would say to her kids, you know, if we would be like, mom, are we, are we the best looking children on the block? And she'd be like, well, to me you are. But I don't know, like, maybe you're not, maybe you're really homely, but, but I wouldn't know because I'm your mom. So you're beautiful to me. And now that I'm a dad, I realize that is, that is true.
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A
How many girls, by the way?
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B
I have four. Four girls, four daughters and a son.
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A
I have a question. Yes, go ahead.
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B
All of them equally. All five of them equally. Perfect.
- [19:54]
A
And so did you push Judy Bloom into their hands?
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B
You know? Well, my, my wife is more the read aloud parent for the most banal of reasons. I mean, my wife and I both love to read. She reads more and has read more and has read way more children's literature. So she was the probably going to be that parent anyway. But also she has much more endurance about reading aloud. I mean, she will like crack open a Hunger Games or Harry Potter with one of my kids and an hour later they're still reading. And I don't know about you, I mean, you talk for a living, but it's hard to just read aloud nonstop for an hour. And I just like, after 15, 20 minutes I'm like, okay, let's watch some TV, kid.
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A
Well, you've done audiobooks, right? You've read your own audiobooks ever?
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B
Yes. Have you ever done an audiobook?
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A
Yes.
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B
It's torture.
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A
I did a few chapters and it's a whole other thing.
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B
It's torture reading your own words aloud in a small room to yourself. Your eyes glaze over. Yeah, I did one audiobook and this one, let me just say, when they got Molly Ringwald to do this one, that was great for so many reasons, right?
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A
Yes.
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B
So George Cooper says to me, why her? And I have a few theories. I mean, one is she was a relentless promoter, as one should be, of her own work and the work of others. She was a good citizen of the literary community. So because she went to libraries, because she went to schools, because she was out there so much, they wanted to support her. They always stocked her, they always pushed her books into kids hands. Also, kids who didn't like to read, liked to read Judy. So librarians figured out like get, you know, order 20 copies of her books because we can sell her to all the, we can hand sell these to kids who think they don't like to read. Also, some of her books were just salacious enough that they got passed around from kid to kid. They had a whiff of danger about them. Like there was always, you know, some kids, my parents, your parents probably like, fine, read, whatever. But if you have that friend whose parents are very religious or very uptight or very whatever and they, and they're like, you know, not allowed to read it, you would sneak them, you'd say, oh, page 74 stuff. Sam is dot. So it's Sam isdot. And then, you know, the fact that the product kept coming, that there were 10 books in five years and then it slowed down a little, but let's say 15 books in 10 years. That there was always another Judy in the bookstore when you went to Walden or B. Dalton, that really helped. Kids like series. They like that sort of comfort food. Now, these weren't series, but they liked her voice, they knew they'd like her characters. They knew it was reliable. So you take that versus consistency to
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A
the covers and the fonts and the graphics. Yes.
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B
And by the way, I have tried to find a font historian to talk to me about why certain fonts look very Judy. Like, the COVID of my book is a font called oh God, Olive Village, I think.
- [22:46]
A
Yeah.
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B
Which is a recent.
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A
The bubbly script kind of font.
- [22:49]
B
Yes. Now, this one is a recent font, but it's inspired by Bookman and other 70s era fonts. But it look. And this font was never used for Judy's books, but it looks as if it ought to have been and people love it. And the jacket designer Vienne Nguyen, who I always want to shout out, found this font that looks both contemporary but also like, it's from 1974. And so, yeah, kids would see it. Oh, here's more. Judy Blume. It was great. And look, the prolificness also means that, like, if you get hooked on young people's literature at a time when there was a kind of adolescent revolution, it's the counterculture. People care about what teens are thinking in the 70s. And people are trying to put books in your hands that speak to your experience. After four SE Hintons, you've run out of SE Hinton. You know, like the Outsiders is as great a novel as almost any novel. And, and you know, and then you go through text, rumble, fish. And that was then, this is now. And then she stops. So, you know, Judy, unlike EL Konigsberg, unlike, you know, Paula Danzinger, unlike SE Hinton, just keeps coming. And that also builds on itself. So these feel like a lot of little reasons. There's no one big explanation. But what was yours? You said you had a theory.
- [23:58]
A
In a moment. Back with my theory for Mark Oppenheimer, wherein I just might quote him talking about Judy Blum 26 years ago. The guy's been on the beat for a while. Join us. We're back with Mark Oppenheimer, who has written Judy Blume A Life. And we were just talking about a few of his theories that, when added together, might explain the phenomenon. And I don't disagree with any of them. And I also think that there are two things. Huge amount of luck and network effects. Sometimes the snowball gets rolling and whoever's going to be in first place winds up being in first place by so much more than we could have imagined. What I think, and I was, I read. We should also note that you've long been a Judy Blume enthusiast and you were writing about her in 1997 for the new York Times Book Review. And if you do the math. This is when you were a very young man, a young man in his 20s writing about how much he loved Judy Bloom. Maybe that gets you four daughters down the road. I don't know, maybe that. To be a man of the slipper. What is the, what is the Spanish word for.
- [25:13]
B
Oh, that was another essay I wrote about being a man with four daughters. Right. So there's my. My wonderful close friend from college, Jerry, who is Cuban American, says, you know, in. In Latin culture or Caribbean Latin culture, Cuban culture, South American, they call a man who can only make daughters a chocolatero, which is a. Like chocolatea is a slipper. So it's sort of a slippery sto or a slipper man. And the folk etymology that we came up with is it. It's because maybe your daughters bring you slipper. It's either your daughters bring you slippers, which your sons wouldn't, or you're so kind of effeminate and dainty, you make daughters and you wear slip. Silk slippers or something.
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A
You don't wear the hard work shoes.
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B
Yeah. So I don't know what happens now that I have a son, now that we had a fifth child, it's a boy. If I lose my status, it complicates
- [25:57]
A
the very rigorous science behind slipper. So my theory is something like this, which is that one generation, our parents and maybe even our teachers, who are maybe a half generation below, and actually half generations factored prominently into a lot of my thinking about Judy Blume. But one generation or half generation below, they wanted to be good parents, but they weren't raised in the open culture that had been foisted upon them. So when they began having kids in the 30s, they weren't oriented in ways of how to talk to kids. They knew what the right thing to do was. They maybe had in our bodies ourselves on the bookshelf. They definitely played free to be you and me, but either they were uncomfortable or, you know, maybe, maybe my Catholic dad was that, or they didn't want to misstep and they were a little nervous about it. So what you do is you press into the hands of the child by you're being a good parent by letting them spend time with this trusted. And it was a socially approved way for them to have the talk without really having the talk. And I think maybe I'm wrong, but I think the timing of that was kind of perfect in the culture.
- [27:13]
B
That's. That's a non terrible theory. And I think that's good. And it does. No, I think that's right. Because today, like my wife and I will just, I mean, look, my parents, as I'm sure yours did, told us the birds and the bee, like, they didn't lie to us about the stork. But you're right that they would have been uncomfortable talking about, you know, sex, birth control, masturbation, etc, And I think my wife and I are less uncomfortable. And my grandparents or great grandparents probably just, you know, go figure it out. Go talk to a kid in the schoolyard. Right? Like, like, you know, you'll figure the whatever. So you're right. There is this half step in between. They want their kids to know. They feel it's important as parents that their kids know, but they want to do it by handing them a book. The other evidence that I'll adduce from my own book about that is she is a contemporary of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which I think comes out 68. I want to say I could be a little bit off. She is a contemporary of Free to Be you and Me. In fact, Judy contributed a long poem that later was turned into some of her books and the Pain and the Great One series to the the print companion to Free to Be you and Me. There was a book that they did a year or two after the record album and they call, they got in touch with Judy, who had already written Are youe There, God? It's Me, Margaret, and was kind of, you know, the young, up and coming writer for kids and, you know, seemed like a feminist and a progressive and said, will you write something? And she pulled something out of her drawer that she didn't know what to do with and sent it to them. So she's in the Free to be, you and Me universe. I think that's right. I think that her books. Now, the one complication is I don't have examples of parents even in all of her correspondence saying, thank you, you know, for doing this. I gave your book. It helped me when I gave this book to my kid. But what we do have is that there must have been that thought out there because when Judy started a nonprofit to spend, sort of a philanthropy to figure out how to do good with her money, it was called the Kids Fund. And their stated mission was to help parents and children communicate better. Because she felt based on the mail she'd gotten that one of the urgent, besetting issues in America was poor communication between parents and children over things like sexuality, abortion, so forth and so on. So she did see that she knew on some level that was part of the role that she Was serving, was serving as a kind of a bridge, a communicator. So I think that's really interesting and I think there's probably a. A smart like academic book to be written or just sort of smart intellectual book about that moment of like free to be our bodies, ourselves. It's like how did the Ms. Magazine second wave feminist moment filter down to the adolescents and the kids? I think that's really interesting, but also
- [29:53]
A
to okay, no correspondence from parents, but think about the dynamic that you chronicle with the trumpet club. So the trumpet club, they don't want to censor the books, I guess, but they know that perhaps they've heard some complaints, so they issue a warning. But think about, about what the warning says, which is this. This is a great book. It deals starkly with issues of menstruation or maybe it doesn't even name the actual issues. We recommend that you might want to read the book first before giving it to your child. They didn't say read the book with your child. They didn't say have a combined experience. I think it's, it speaks to addressing the nervousness of the parents around the issue. And the way to do it is you go first, know it's safe, give it to the kids.
- [30:44]
B
That's a really smart close reading. I think you're the Harold Bloom of the moment. You're right, I didn't think about that. Don't co. Read it with your kid, but read it first and then give it to your kid. There's a great article in the Times magazine in the late seventies written by Joyce Maynard, who of course had become recently famous herself as a teenagers. Yeah, she was, we later learned that she ended up being, after she wrote the piece, her breakout piece. She ended up becoming Salinger's very young lover for a while, which she later wrote a book about. And she found him somewhat emotionally abusive and so forth. But she'd written a piece for the Times magazine called something like an 18 year old looks Back on Life. Is that what it was called?
- [31:24]
A
Right. Oh yeah. It got so much attention. Yeah.
- [31:26]
B
Or 17 year old looks Back on Life. And it was published when she was a teenager and it was sort of just this smart, wise piece on what's it like to be a teenager now. And that came out, I want to say, in the early 70s. So there she is six or seven years later, already a seasoned writer. She has a baby and she brings the baby to New York and the baby sitting like a bassinet while Joyce Maynard is interviewing Judy Blume, who is like, you know, I guess almost 40 at that point. She's born 1938. So it's like a 30 year old interviewing a 40 year old about the young people. It's a really good magazine profile. But one of the things that you made me think of is a lot of the profile is taken up with the story of how kids buy her books and share them amongst each other. And the parents sometimes buy the books and read them first. And some parents won't read the books, or they read the books, then try to take them away from their kids. And the kids have this sort of samizdat thing where they share the books. It's all about the sort of like parallel worlds of what are parents making of her books and what are kids making of her books. And that piece would never be written today because parents all want to be kids. They all look cool. I'm cool mom, right? It's Amy Poehler from Mean Girls. Like, you know, I mean, there are obviously parents who want to censor with their kids read, but the dominant cultural mode is parents trying to seem really young and be cool and down with the kids. And that sense that the parents are walking around in sensible shoes and spectacles with reading the books themselves and marry
- [32:45]
A
a cargo short among them.
- [32:47]
B
Yes, right. And you're right, it was, it was, it was kind of the last gasp of that world in which the adults were on one side of a real generational divide and the kids were on another. And there was a way in which Judy's book sat in between as this thing that both of them were peering at.
- [33:03]
A
Well, to take you then to 1997, in your essay you pointed to, and this was called why Judy Bloom Indoors. How, how little we knew how much you would endure and become part of your life. But you wrote about how the librarians then, who became her biggest fan, librarians being progressive, but librarians at the time didn't give her awards. But also librarians and teachers, they were nervous about dealing with these subjects. So you write, what if a teacher had to handle the subject of an obese girl, as in blubber, and the cruelty to which her classmates subject her in a class that most likely includes a similar situation. Faced with such immediacy, it is surely best the teachers figure to assign Black Beauty or Johnny Tremaine. In other words, change the subject, place the material far away in time or place, leave the sex talk to the gym teachers. That entire definition of what it was to be a good mentor, parent, teacher changed during the lifetime of Judy Bloom. And she was a beneficiary.
- [34:07]
B
Right, right. That, that. I mean, you're right. We think of librarians now as the most progressive, the most, some would say the most woke of professions, just total children's advocates. But they were really back then as likely to be looking to protect children and to be in that world of parents, teachers, adults who are preserving the innocence of childhood, who are keeping the hard facts from kids.
- [34:33]
A
And it was shusher model of librarian versus the open reading time model. Yes.
- [34:38]
B
And one of the things I taught, I've talked about a lot as I've been interviewed about this book. People always say, what was your experience with librarians? I did a. An interview with myself for Oldster magazine, and I hope you, like me, agree that Oldster is pretty great. And I told the story. I asked myself the question, you know, who introduced you to Judy Blume? Was it a librarian or something? I told the story about how the librarian at the Forest park branch of the Springfield Public Library, where I grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, could not have been meaner. I mean, she. If you were to look at, if you were to come up with the admittedly unfair prejudice, stereotypical definition of the sort of angry, bitter spinster, look at peering down over her spectacles, her half glasses that are on the croakies, you know, the sort of chain link croakies.
- [35:24]
A
Yes.
- [35:25]
B
Her hair set like Ann Landers or Dear Abbey. The sort of massive helmet of bouffant hair and just in a bun that
- [35:31]
A
if she, if she took it out and shakes her head, she becomes immediately sexy. Not that kind.
- [35:36]
B
All of a sudden she's on the COVID of Wifey. You know, she was that person with a personality to match. And she seemed just to want to, like, if anything, drive children away from books. And I don't. I think I got my Judy Blooms at the Walden Bookstore. I think I took my allowance and, you know, 495 or whatever. They weren't expensive, but. But I think if I'd gone to the library for my Judy Blume, she would have said, well, now what? Why don't you have your mother come in and check that out for you? You know, she definitely saw herself as the ally of people who were carefully curating what childhood would. Would look like and ensuring that it remained in a sort of perhaps interwar mode. So childhood, circa 1925, without the gin and the music and. Yes, that. That model of librarian. I mean, librarians are. And you know, God love them, they are, they are hipsters now. They are tatted up hipsters who are progressively looking to, to help children, you know, grow up into a difficult world with a lot of hard reality, with a lot of changing mores and, and if anything, Judy, you know, is too milquetoast for some of them because Judy's characters are, you know, kind of relentlessly, probably straight, you know, white middle class girls. And that's, you know, that's one particular mode.
- [36:56]
A
So you collaborated with Judy Blume as you were writing this book. And I think that that essay that I quoted, did that first put you on her radar? She got in touch with you from that.
- [37:09]
B
Yeah. I always want to be careful to say not, not to pick nits that you know, collaboration is the wrong word because I think it's my book.
- [37:18]
A
Right. And I take that.
- [37:19]
B
Yes, but she was a source. She was a very good and generous source. And yes, we first met. I wrote this piece when I was 23 years old for the New York Times Book Review, which I sent in. I didn't know a soul. It's not like I was. Had been an intern there or something. I sent in this essay that I wrote about Judy Blume that I think I just wrote one day. Like I think I was bored and I had a kind of idea in my head and wanted to type it out and then I printed it out on the dot matrix printer and then I folded.
- [37:50]
A
Luckily there was no substack to suck up your attention and your output. That's good.
- [37:56]
B
Nothing. No, I mean all that was sucking up my attention and my output circa 1997 was the, the late waning years of, of. Of Beverly Hills 90210, Back to the Future 3. I don't know. I mean I was. Yeah, I had nothing to do and
- [38:14]
A
I mean what most people did by Cracker.
- [38:16]
B
Yeah, exactly. I was doing the Achy Breaky, I think. And so I, I literally typed it up one afternoon and, and mailed it in snail mail, I think. I found a white pages and found the New York Times address on West 40, the old building on West 43rd, and mailed it in. A month later got a letter back from the book review from the editor Katherine Bouton, who was great, saying we like this piece and we have some edits. Would you be willing to take some edits if you know, if we can come together on an edited version, we would publish it. Is that okay? I thought, well, shit, yeah, that's okay.
- [38:52]
A
Accepted their terms.
- [38:54]
B
I'll accept your turn. What you want, you want to pay me a dollar? Sure, that sounds great. How generous of you. I mean, it was my, you know, I was a newbie. I was. I was a baby of the woods, of course, and. And then they said, we'll need your fax number so we can send edits to you. So I had to go find a fax machine somewhere. And I published this piece and comes out. And Judy Bloom sent me a very nice note, probably also snail mail, if I think about it, saying, I liked it. You know, I'd love to meet. We ended up meeting that summer. She invited me to her house on Martha's Vineyard. And then we stayed in very loose touch over the years. Like every three or four or five years, one of us would drop the other one an email, because that was. We met at sort of the cusp of email. And. And at some point I suggested maybe she would let me interview her for a biography of her, that I should be her biographer. And she said no, at least a couple times. It was like the urban legend that when you go to the rabbi to convert for Judaism, they're supposed to turn you away three times to make sure you really want to do it. And she turned me away at least three times. And then finally, in the summer of 22, she sent me a note saying, you know, maybe we should talk about this.
- [39:57]
A
Okay, so she was very open, honest. How honest? How guarded? How often? I mean, obviously you wanted access to everything that you could get, but were there times in the writing process where you were really stymied by her or her family's putting things in a no go zone?
- [40:19]
B
Less than you would think. I mean, the one example that comes to mind is that she really didn't want to talk about her second marriage. She. When she left. So she married young. She married John Bloom when she was still in college. I joked that he was the big five. He was a tall, dark, handsome Jewish lawyer. I mean, and if you've got those. I mean, look at you, Mike. You're tall and you're Jewish.
- [40:43]
A
Yeah.
- [40:43]
B
Little, dark, handsome.
- [40:46]
A
Come on, give me the handsome.
- [40:47]
B
We'll give you handsome.
- [40:47]
A
Definitely not giving me the lawyer.
- [40:49]
B
I'll give you the handsome. But you're not a lawyer. I mean, you're. You're barely employed. I'm short. Like, John Bloom had a lot on both of us.
- [40:56]
A
And blue eyes, finance. All of it.
- [40:58]
B
Yeah, all of it. He was a veteran. He had just gotten out of his army service. This is the 50s. You're still being drafted. Like he'd been in the JAG Corps. I mean, he was, he was a hunk and a good Catch. But it wasn't really a love match. She would later figure out. She finally leaves him after 15 years. You know, she's reading Ms. Magazine. There's kind of a revolution going on. She leaves him and then very quickly falls into this pretty stupid marriage with a physicist named Tom Kitchens, whom she's met on an airplane. She's with him ultimately about four years, beginning to end. They're married for, like, two of it. They move a bunch of times. She yanks her kids across the ocean to England, then to New Mexico. These are Jersey kids. And it's really kind of like a bad scene. And when I was. And then she leaves him and almost instantly meets George Cooper, whom she falls in love with. And it's. They're still together and still very happy. So the second marriage, the first marriage makes sense and, you know, no regrets. The last marriage is a love match. The middle marriage is stupid and she didn't want to talk about it. And in particular, she didn't tell me. I figured out from her correspondence, from letters that were in there, that he. When she met him, he had like, a baby, an out of wedlock baby with a mistress in. In Scotland or something, who we'd met in Denmark. I'm making this all up, but, like, someone in the physics world, a woman physicist in that world, he'd had an affair with. She had a baby, and he basically, like, didn't, you know, didn't take any interest. And she was sending these. What happened was I found these letters from her to Judy saying, like, I have a baby and Tom needs to be with me and with his daughter. And not running. Not running around with this, you know, famous author.
- [42:38]
A
It's gotta go in the biography.
- [42:40]
B
And of course it has to go in the biography. And I reached. I found the woman who had written the letters. And she talked to me, though ultimately didn't want me to quote her directly, so I have to paraphrase the daughter that they had, to whom Judy was a stepmother, if you want to think about it that way, but whom she, I don't think ever met, ended up dying in her 20s. I'm not sure how. Cloudy circumstances. So the whole thing is like a shit show. And Judy did not tell me about that. I mean, did not go into these, which is. And then when I asked her about it, she said, well, you know, I didn't even know that he had this kid till I'd been with him a little while. And then when I. When I figured it out, because I was getting these letters, it was A massive red flag. Okay, but let's talk about that. And understandably, that was not her favorite topic. But I want to be clear, like the reason that leaps to mind is because it was the exception. She was generally so open, you know, about when I asked questions about her sex life, about her illnesses, her breast cancer, her abortions.
- [43:38]
A
Yes.
- [43:38]
B
The men she dated, her writing process. She really was a dream interview. And so it was the rare thing that she kind of played close to the chest.
- [43:48]
A
Did you unearth her affairs when she was married and how her first marriage, how her husband dealt with that, or had she written about that?
- [43:57]
B
I'm not sure about this, but I don't think she had written about it. She's written almost no nonfiction. So if it would have been like, had it come up in an interview where she said, well, you know, my first marriage, I was unfaithful once. I think she was unfaithful twice to one night stands.
- [44:11]
A
I think, yes, once they never had sex. Those slept together. I mean, how you get these details, I have no idea. Or, I mean, did not know I wanted them.
- [44:18]
B
But yes, a little tmi. No, she told me, I mean, I think I asked her, I said, well, were you and John at the end, were you faithful to each other? And she said, he was faithful to me. And I, you know, was a little bit unfaithful and then told him and, you know, infidelity wasn't the problem, basically. And she told me about that. It was funny. There was, there were a couple commenters online who felt like surely Judy was horrified to see Joyce Carol Oates tweeted something like this, you know, how horror. I'm paraphrasing. How horrible to see that, you know, he would delve into her private life, her, her, her illness, her abortions. I'm like, that's the last thing that would have bothered Judy. I mean, her cancer is something that she has spoken about and you know, she's talked about the importance of testing and she had a, you know, I think a half mastectomy and reconstruct. I mean, that, that Judy Blume would be bothered that someone would deal candidly and realistically with that kind of health issue, even though it might make some people squeamish, is absurd. And Judy has talked about her abortions publicly. I mean, she's been a donor to Planned Parenthood. You know, this is not stuff that she was. Would be mad at me for sharing, nor is it stuff that I had to dig really hard to unearth. I think she would, she has been, you know, she's proudly pro choice. She's obviously, you know, she's talked about her divorces. She's talked about her cancer and her husband's cancer. She is, you know, she's mostly an open book, although nobody is entirely an open book. And that creates a space where I have to do some digging.
- [45:49]
A
Mark Oppenheimer is the author of Squirrel Hill thirteen in a Day. He is the proprietor of Ark, which talks about religion, politics and also et
- [46:00]
B
cetera, my favorite, lots of et cetera. Yeah.
- [46:02]
A
Yes. His new biography is Judy Bloom, A Life. Thank you so much.
- [46:07]
B
It's been an honor as ever.
- [46:13]
A
And that's it for today's show. Cory War produces the gist. Kathleen Sykes runs the gist list. Ben Astaire is our booking producer and Jeff Craig runs our socials. Michelle Pesca oversees it all benevolently. And thanks for listening.