Gabfest Reads | The Unlikely Rise of Judy Blume

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Hello and welcome to GabFest Reads for the month of April 2026. I am Emily Baslan,

one of the hosts of Slate's political gapfest. I am so pleased to be here today with Mark Oppenheimer,

who is the author of several books and teaches at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and

Politics at Wash You. We are here to talk about his new book, which I am a big fan of. It is

called Judy Bloom, a life and it is a biography of the iconic author, Judy Bloom. Of course,

the author of, are you there, God, it is me, Margaret, and everything else under the sun that we

read is teenagers, Dini, and starring Sally J. Freeman as herself. Then again, maybe I won't,

and SuperFudge and a million other things. Judy Bloom changed the face of literature for kids

and young teenagers. She is one of the most successful authors I think of the 20th century ever.

She sold about 90 million books. I think she is the, she is certainly one of the top five selling

women authors ever and maybe the most successful Jewish woman author ever. I mean, there are all

sorts of superlatives. 90 million books, it is just a lot of books, Emily.

Really, I don't think I have sold 90 million books. That's more than being able to put together.

Oh my God, so much more. We're not even in the universe. So many extra zeros.

Exactly. So why? So why Judy Bloom? There were a lot of people in the moment she started in 1970

who were starting to write what you call realistic novels for young, for like tweens, right? You're

kind of distinguishing her from what we now think of as YA, young adult. So anyway, that's a lot

of detail for me to be giving. But why? Why was she the person who generated so much love and

controversy and so many book sales? Judy is the one who says that it's not YA. She always draws

that distinction. So I honor her. There wasn't such a category. No one talked about YA. There was no

category in the bookstore in 1970 for YA. And also her books really are as you indicate for middle

grade readers or they're not young readers. I think you'd call them middle grade. Kids don't

want to read their own age. They want to read about kids three or four years older. So books that are

about 12 and 13 year olds like are you there? Got it to me, Margaret. You know, we're often read by

nine and 10 year olds, which is to say like fifth fifth grade or so. She had two books that you could

arguably say were really like YA. And that's forever and tiger eyes, which really are for like,

let's say freshman in high school, you might call it. As to why her, you're totally right that she

wasn't alone. She was part of a movement unsurprisingly, a sort of late 60s early 70s movement,

aligning with the counter culture, aligning with second wave feminism, aligning with a new attention

to the emotional lives of young people and particularly young girls. She was very contemporaneous

with our bodies ourselves. She was contemporaneous with free to be you and me, which she actually

contributed. She contributed a written piece to the book version of free to be you and me, which I

hadn't realized. And that was really cool. So she was part of a broader social and cultural

movement that included writers like E. Alconigsburg and S. E. Hinton of the outsiders, which was

published a year or two before Margaret. So she wasn't alone and she wasn't V Pioneer, but she

was a pioneer. In terms of why she caught the world's attention and ended up selling so darn many

books and becoming such an icon. I think number one, of course, there is her talent and we could

drill down a bit later if you want about like specifically what makes a Judy Bloom book a really

good book. But also she was a relentless tourer. She went out on tour. She had hundreds of bookstores

and libraries and JCCs and YMCA's and Hadassah meetings and ACLU meetings and I mean just everything.

She would talk about her books anywhere. She's very good on the stump. She's charismatic.

She's appealing. She has a great smile. I mean, one has to say like it. She's pretty and she

always looked very youthful. So especially when she started out, say in 1970 when she was 32,

she easily passed for 18 and so it was as if even though she was a mother of two, you know,

she'd been married a decade and had two kids, but she was going out and talking to teens as if she were

the big sister or the cool young aunt whom they'd always wanted. And you know, and then she stayed

on the scene. She was enormously prolific. I mean, you'll think of someone like Se Hinton who wrote

this extraordinary quartet of books, but then really stopped writing and Judy, you know, ended up

writing a couple dozen books and 10 books in those first five years. So you put all those things

together and you end up with a real cultural phenomenon. That all makes sense to me. So I pulled out

a quote from you, which I thought was really helpful for my thinking about this. You write,

Judy's innovation when she began writing was not to describe menstruation first kisses or

teenagers orgasms. She'd grown up reading about these things. She just thought those topics didn't

have to say sequestered in books for grownups. And I feel like you're talking about this kind of move

where she is willing to be very frank and funny about sex and about girls' bodies and boys' bodies

in this way that I remember being pretty revelatory for me as a teenager. Are you there, God? It's

me, Mara Redd was published in 1970. I probably read it when I was like 10 or 11 definitely before I

got my period. I wasn't like a huge Judy Bloom super fan. There were other writers who kind of

spoke to me more like Paul Danzagar you mentioned briefly as you wrote this book called The Cat Ain't

My Gymsuit. I really remember that. No, no plan was another one who was very big at the time. Paul

Zindell, like there are these somewhat forgotten ones who are certainly literally as great as Judy.

Yes. And I liked some of those writers better for whatever reason. And also like when you

are reading as a kid you're not thinking about who came first or right. I didn't know that are

you there, God? It's me, Margaret, like when it was published, et cetera. But I do remember the

frankness about girls' bodies being important and helpful. And you know, one of the things that

you explore so well as you talk about her childhood and why that might have made her into this person

who was so frank and funny about sex. And you know, she grew up in like it sounded like a very

pretty typical suburban Jewish New York household. Her mom was at home. Her dad was working,

but they seemed those parents like they were kind of they raised her to be unashamed about

sex in a way that seemed surprising for that era. Yeah, definitely. So the fact that she had

been reading about these things in books for adults is interesting. Her parents were readers. Her

mom in particular who hadn't gone to college. Her dad was a dentist and gone to college in dental

school. But her mom hadn't was not educated, but was a big reader. And so Judy had been pulling

books off of the shelves that her mother let her pull off the shelf. So you think of the sex and

the death and the alcoholism in great Gatsby. I mean, there's a lot there. Think about all that

goes on in Steinbach or Sinclair Lewis. She's reading these books that are totally frank about

sexuality. A very important one was John O'Hara, whose book A Rage to Live was probably his best

known, but he was huge. I mean, he was the equal of all of these people we now remember except

he's been forgotten. And if you open a rage to live, which Judy, I think that her mom said she

wasn't ready for it, but then her aunt Frances sneaked it over to her. She had an aunt who was

ended up a high school principal and or principal and and was a big reader. And you know, and the

that O'Hara book has within the first like 50 or 100 pages has a teenage girl get her period,

talked to her mother about her period and full around with a boy who is very aggressive and it's

a little bit obscure what happens, but it seems pretty rapy. It seems like he pushes things farther

than she wants them to their in her room, their necking, their making out things go really quite far.

So you know, let's say menstruation, rape, you know, body changes, all this stuff, but it's in a

novel for adults. And and and that was where you got it if you were a bookish kid. So Judy's parents

did allow her to be a bookish kid who read in an adult register and that that was progressive of

them. But then the other thing was they were themselves quite comfortable with their bodies. Dad,

in particular, dad would have Judy, I think the detail was that he would like sometimes let her

clip his toenails and stuff like he would have her groom him sometimes which is very little. They,

she took baths with her brother and sometimes dad was in the bath or the shower when they were

very little. I mean, not not when she's 12 or 14, but but still like that was not creepy, but Frank

and like, and and appropriately Frank, like, you know, Frank about nudity with a four or six

year old in a way that people get more modest when, you know, a girl is an adolescent and you know,

they were quite contemporary parents in that way. And also her sort of very casual nominal Jewish

upbringing, the conservative synagogue they belong to, but never went to quite typical

was was not, you know, there were no, it wasn't like the Catholic church where there were sermons

about, you know, if a boy touches you here, you could go to hell. I mean, she wasn't getting

preached out by anybody about her virtue or her purity or her chastity. And so when she discovered

fooling around with a female friend, which she did a few times when she discovered masturbation,

there there was no set it was like cool. I've discovered this thing. There was no sense like

if mom found out that I would be told I'm going to hell. I mean, it would be embarrassing because

you don't want your parents to find out those things about you, but there was no sense that her

soul was at stake or that her character was at stake. The reason not to get pregnant for

Judy and her friends was because it could ruin your life. Like then you'd have to get married and

you know, you wouldn't finish high school. I mean, there were pragmatic,

prudential reasons to save yourself for marriage, but it wasn't about whether you were a good person

or not. Right. And thinking about those prudential reasons could also be a reason to be frank about

sex, right? And in forever, which as you were saying is like real YA and has a lot of sex in it

and famously a penis named Ralph. That really is like the detail of Judy Bloom that one remembers

forever, forever. I mean, that is a special that was kind of a special book to me. And the reason is

that it's quite positive about teenage sex. Like it's not about, you know, this is the road to hell

or like anyone like people are there's a lot of pleasure in that book, which I think is I don't

know, I was trying to say. Judy said, so this is also interesting because the 70s were a time as

we've discussed where there was a sort of new frankness in the literature for young people,

but a lot of that frankness came packaged as like scare stories as horror stories. There were

there were like a lot of novels for young people in which, you know, the girl sort of goes off,

you know, off the path and ends up smoking cigarettes and that's the gateway to weed and that's the

gateway to heroin and that's the gateway to being raped in the back of a car and then she has to have

an abortion and like sex is always, it's not that the girl was at fault necessarily, but it's super

bad and it's the result of all these bad choices and it's painful and horrible and then she's not

going to have sex again for 10 years until she, you know, is an adult and finds a nice boy and whatever

and Judy's daughter, Randy, said to her at one point, mom, I'm so sick of reading, you know,

like books in which sex is always this like horrible, you know, coercive thing or this thing that

you're ashamed of afterwards or it's the wrong guy, just where it ends badly. And so Judy decided

to write a book in which the sex goes well in which teenage sex is consensual and pleasurable

and a little bit awkward and weird as teenage sex as all sex is when you're having it with someone

for the first time and and that's the book she writes and what's you and but here's the master's

stroke. Here's the real bit of genius is that they break up at the end is that it's not like oh

Catherine and Michael, I think it's Catherine Michael, right? It's not like they fall in love at 18

of mutually pleasurable sex and then stay together till marriage or even stay together through college

and it's like they're each other's first great love. They're not that in love and she goes

off to a summer camp and starts fooling around with the tennis instructor and I think he starts

college before she does and he's going to do stuff and like it's totally what everyone remembers.

Like it's the best case scenario for high school, which is like and until then they still have good

sex like yeah, yeah, exactly and those all those other things can also be true. They have a bunch

of good sex and then summer camp and college kind of ruins things and then they break up and presumably

now they have a good template for sex. Like that was actually more revolutionary than if they'd

like lost their virginity before marriage but had them stayed together for 10 years, right? Which

would have in a way still continued the like trope of you want sex to be magical and perfect and

virtue us or something. So no, that was that was Randy's idea. I love that. So here's a thing that

really surprised me. Your rendition of Judy Bloom seems to suggest that she was like a popular girl

in junior high and high school. She seemed to be kind of like a little bit running the show of her

group of friends. One of her friends says she even then had poise. There was something pied

piperish about her. People wanted to be in her aura and I have to say this kind of messed with me

because I'm used to the idea that authors were myths, myths and had some moments being tortured

like me and the idea that she could have just sort of like smoothly just kind of tripped through

junior school and high school but then written so well about the awkwardness of adolescence.

And that was so interesting. And then I started thinking a lot about blubber because the thing about

blubber which to me is like one of her more memorable books and it's really about bullying. So when I

was writing about bullying, it's good. I reread it. It's not told from the perspective of the

victim. And maybe exactly. So how did you think about Judy's tween hood and adolescence?

This is a super interesting vein because one of the critiques you find in the 70s and I guess in

the 80s when people started writing critical articles about her and some of them are like scholarly

articles in journals about children's literature or contemporary American literature. One of the

attacks on her coming you might say from the left from the feminist left. The sort of they wouldn't

have talked about fat shaming them but the sort of proto anti-bullying anti-fat shaming feminist

left was that her protagonist, the people you identify with are these perky popular pretty girls

who are not in any way misfits or outcasts. Your absolutely right that blubber is told from the

perspective of a bystander, not really an upstander, not an ally, someone who takes a long time to sort

of figure out where her own integrity is. And she's narrating the story of this classmate who's

getting bullied for being heavy. And so it's Judy's identification as an author really is with

the the normies, the mainstream kids and she was like yeah a normie and a mainstream kid and quite

popular not only because she was nice which she really was and kind and decent to people but also

because she was pretty and smart and thin and although you know she points out back then body type

you know being being the strontiest skinniest kid which she was wasn't always the prettiest right

there's this was an error where like more bucsum girls were valued in in ways they're you know these

things change over time. So that's a little bit complicated but she was always pretty she was always

cheery she was popular she's has great sort of emotional intuitiveness I think she was good at

making people feel seen she also had a really fun house her dad was a lot of fun and and her

friends loved being there so her house was kind of the center of things for like little extended

crowd of girls in starting an elementary school but in through middle school and and high school

so or really middle school and high school so her identity was as somebody who was certainly not

bullied or not othered and but she also had this talent which is what part of what makes for a

great fiction writer for observation so in her books it's not shocking when you put this all together

that the narrators or the the central characters are often popular and fairly you know within the

bounds of what you might call normal mainstream clicks but they are good observers of what's

going of the suffering going on with other people or the sort of eccentricity I mean forever too

there's a fairly sympathetic character who's clearly coded as gay and I think ends up attempting

suicide and you know it's it's sort of quasi-tragic the only queer or queer-ish character in Judy

Blooms' Ove and but again this is told sympathetically but from the kind of authorial point of

view of the mainstream characters in the in the relationship so that's you know there are people

to who think of her as actually having reinforced stereotypes of what girls ought to be rather than

having like smashed them interesting I was taken also with Judy as a second wave feminist so she

goes to college she gets married fairly early to like a very appropriate but kind of boring

guy he goes off and makes a living she has these two little kids and she's bored I mean she's like

Betty for Dan you know a generation a mini-generation later and her first idea is to make felt art

which she succeeds in selling to blooming dales I believe which was crazy yeah but also like goes

to this quality in her that seems so much part of her success and you touched on this earlier but

she was irrepressible and incredibly industrious I mean man she like takes a writing class she stays

in touch with her teacher she just keeps going and you also make this really astute point that she

is good at accepting criticism and also at rejecting it which is important because early on she gets

this like hilarious rejection letter from this super condescending male editor that was so funny

well the I mean the story there is he wasn't at her but he wasn't her editor he she hadn't submitted

to him he'd actually helped shepherd some of the doctor sus books into print he was an editor but

it wasn't a submission it was really an early thing and and her husband john bloom who yes was kind

of the perfect boring first husband he was I say he was the big five he was tall dark handsome

Jewish lawyer like you know every one of those he was like six foot something handsome army veteran

he was the big six he was also like he was an army veteran he was tall dark handsome Jewish lawyer

veteran I mean he was perfect six years or senior they met when she was like 19 he was 25 and he's

finishing up his Jag core service and you know and but he knew somebody who knew somebody who was this

editor who said he would look at Judy's book and that guy as you know wrote back this unbelievably

condescending sexist scathing letter that basically was like look your work socks which you know

to be fair at that point did it sucks in these particularly female ways and then he said things

like now don't get your panties in a bunch you know don't go all girl on me pull up your big girl

pants and do better and it's this weird mix of incredible ruthless condescension and also saying like

there's hope like you made yeah it's on a note of now like you know throw this letter away and go make

yourself great so he's a mess exactly genetic I mean what can you say except that some people

temper mentally and genetically are are more able to receive 25 rejection letters many of them

scathing and just keep going she really did and when she decided she needed a creative outlet as

you say you know she she tried felt art which she sold on consignment through blooming dales children's

department they were these like framed things like canvas or muslin backing with felt

application glued onto them you'd buy them for a children's nursery and she sold a bunch of them

for like six months and then didn't want to do that and she tried composing songs but then

she would come up with a melody she liked to play piano and and she'd then hear the melody on

the radio two days later and realize that she'd actually already heard that she'd stolen it from

a popular a top 40 song and then she tried doing sort of children's illustrated books like rhyming

doctor su style books for you know three and four and five year old and then finally takes this

adult ed class with his teacher whom she and then then having made a little progress she signs up

for the same class again even though it's the same syllabus and the teacher says like we're

just going to be doing the same things and she says I just want to keep doing the homework

and that homework turns into ikees house again it's really just her first book

which is so personal like the book I was just so impressed with how she just doggedly kept going

and she's also the kind of writer who's able to write really pretty quickly to revise a lot

so fascinating that she doesn't revise dialogue because she just had a real ear for how people

and particularly kids speak which is like really hard um yeah that period this explosion of

productivity where she writes these ten famous books is just 10 books in five years it was really

something I should also add not only was she getting all this rejection but she didn't have

a soul to talk to about the writing life I mean when you think of like you and I and a lot of

people we know who came up I mean we're the same sort of writer generation even if you were from

the hinterlands and didn't like know any writers and I have to say I didn't know any writers going up

if you didn't meet them in college maybe you went to an MFA program if you didn't do that well by

certainly by 2000 so you could get on the internet and find somebody who might support you you know

or some reading circle or reading group or something and obviously some people have more

connections or a raised without greater sense of confidence and entitlement than others but

it's very hard to to imagine how isolated she was I mean she didn't she was a housewife in New

Jersey her husband was a lawyer her father was a dentist her friends had all gotten married and

almost none had a career or had a career yet and when she finally got an acceptance letter from

a publisher she didn't her husband wasn't that interested her kids were little her mom and dad

I don't think her dad was dead her mom didn't know what she'd been up to she went hugged the mailman

like that was that was the warm cherry face who she knew would be happy for her there was no agent

no agent like she hugged the mailman yeah it's pretty awesome the just like self driven determination

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okay we have to talk about waifi this is her scandalous adult novel I confess I have never read

waifi cover to cover only read the sex arts as a teenager I think lots of people probably experience

that way it sounds kind of terrible perhaps in retrospect what animated that book why did she

want to write an adult book and what is she working out in those pages yeah I mean so waifi she wrote

I think she wanted to try flexing her creative muscle she wanted to write for older people she wrote

it right after she finished sali j freeedman starring sali j freeedman as herself which is I think the

most ambitious of her young people's books it's the most autobiographical I think it's the best I

think it really holds up and it's crazy that it's never been made into a movie it's absolutely the

most filmable of all of them and she was living in new mexico in this incredibly bad second marriage

to a a you know southern baptist physicist whom she met from oak la homa from small town oak la

homa whom she met on an airplane when her first marriage was falling apart and then when the

marriage fell apart she quickly got in touch with this guy they'd exchanged addresses they clearly

were into each other and started this romance this new jersey dc romance and he then had to move

to england for work for six months or a year and she yanked her kids out of school and moved the whole

family with him and got married in a london town hall in one of the like the burrows of london

and then he quickly moved them all to new mexico so he could work at los alamos labs and so she zips

the kids to new mexico to start school the next fall and so like their dad's back home their mom

is like kind of going crazy and they're living with this stepfather new mexico and she's working out

just like man issues I mean she she realizes that her first marriage started well and had its

successes but ultimately wasn't right for her and then the romance that she thought was going to

you know deliver on the promise of sexual freedom that she wanted in the mid 70s turns out to be a

total disaster and she ends up getting pregnant twice by him and two abortions because she just

can't imagine I mean she doesn't want more children and she can't imagine raising children with

Tom kitchens and then she gets this office over a donut shop in town and starts writing waifi and

waifi is basically her fantasy life manifest on the page it's a woman who doesn't leave the

first marriage gets to keep the stable first husband but has ridiculous affairs um I now like

forget all the plot points it's like I think maybe she sleeps with her brother in law certainly

there's sex in some sort of pool like there's always pools and jacuzzi lots of jacuzzi that's a

different adult novel where the jacuzzi's coming that's the nature that smart women but like it

moves from pools to jacuzzi's there's a lot of like well watered well lubricated sex with hot men

who are who are sometimes like you know quasi open marriages a bit it's ridiculous and

um so she's you know she's working out her fantasy life and there are scenes that are so

racy that actually her publisher won't publish them the um haleen mire who owns her publishing

company and basically said of some of the scenes like my granddaughter reads your books I'm not

putting this stuff in your book and yet a lot of racy material made in oh oh I mean it's

it's it's crazy I mean I don't know like I is this a family show like do we want to talk about

what some of you can we give it a spoiler you're welcome to say whatever you would like but you

also don't have to I mean you know it's just look in today's porn saturated world none of this stuff

probably none of it would blow the mind of a 12 year old but I mean for one thing she's always

the main character is like always soaking through her panties she's so turned on by being around

these men she's sleeping with it's like the movie theater seats get wet when they go to a movie

uh it's just like you know so that's so that's one interesting detail um you know she has these

affairs she gets gonorrhea by one of them and so she has to confess the affair to her husband

and then they end up in this conversation about oral sex because it turns out her husband won't do

it but the guy she's been sleeping with will so then her they decide that like he will but only

if she shaves herself first like goes fully bald down there like that that will permit oral sex

which is like maybe some notion out there that that was the only way one could have it I it was

new to me but I feel like that record anyway really so that idea like it's not part of my generation

but I feel like it then came back that idea interesting yeah and then the scene that was caught

because it was so racie involved sandy pressman the main character receiving oral sex from her dog

really glad they cut that but that was cut to be fair that was cut from the book um although

New York magazine when they read an excerpt from my book like the description of that scene being cut

was exactly where they went I'm shocked as if whitey ends up so whitey you know her agent and her

editors and lots of your life well her agent is happy to sell it she knows it'll be big but there

are people in her life in her circle who say do not publish this because you have a career as a

writer for children and this will ruin you as a right no one will take you seriously doing that

anymore or or publish it under a pseudonym and Judy you know to what I would say is her credit like

she stands behind her work and it's like no this is a Judy bloom book and it came out and it's sold

a billion copies and um I will say in its defense there's some really interesting smart satire

on suburban materialism in whitey really sharp like the fact that her two nieces are basically forced

by their parents to get nose jobs she has these two nieces who everyone's mystified are

homely because the mom is beautiful and the husband's very handsome and they get these two daughters

with like big noses and are and I think they're pudgy also they're heavy and a big noses like the

two worst things that you can be and it's basically told to them you have to go to the hospital

when you turn 12 or the week before your bond so I don't know I forget and and get your noses fixed

and nobody really gives the girls much choice in the matter and they get a discount because they're

two and they get a two for one discount from the plastic surgeon if because they're twins if they

go in on the same day two for one so like that's really sharp I mean I read that and cringed in a way

that reflected how good the satire was and I think that there are powers that Judy has as a writer

that didn't always come out in her adult fiction but you see these flashes of real brilliance

so she divorced twice then she has a third marriage that sounds like a wonderfully happy

companion it partnership what did you take away from this later part of her life she works a lot

on making sure the books don't get banned that happened to her books a lot you point out it's

not necessarily because they were the most controversial or salacious but because they were so

popular they were all over the place but she's like really stalwart in defending other writers too

anyway what do you make of the sort of later I mean she keeps writing her she wrote until

2015 when her last adult novel came out and you know she's well into her seventies by that point

but a lot of her life becomes the business of being a writer so not only responding to thousands of

fans she doesn't not every fan gets a personalized letter but hundreds of them do and the rest do get

some sort of response and she you know she employs a full-time secretary in part to be a

beautiful correspondent with her with her fans and a lot of it has to she begins working with Hollywood

on adaptations most of which come to come to not but but a lot of her right of her life as a professional

woman of letters is fighting challenges to read I'm always very careful about the word censorship

because I think that has legal connotations that weren't always in play like nobody was being put

in jail for selling her books the way people had been put in jail for selling lady chatterlies lover

and I think we just want to be careful about that nevertheless there were a lot of challenges to

her books placement in school libraries and public libraries and a lot of attempts to keep them out

of the reach of children which she vigorously opposed and she ended up doing a lot of work I mean

hundreds if not thousands of hours with the national coalition against censorship promoting the

freedom to read and also getting other authors to join the fight you know there are a lot of notes

handwritten notes from her to you know Stephen King and Joyce Carolotes and Nora Efron and just

all of these other writers saying this is our fight and you have to you know give money by a table

at the at the benefit or put your name on the host committee or sign this petition or I mean she

was really the leader in that community the a writer is saying we really have to take this seriously

it's not enough for us to sit back and write best sellers and count our money like we have to make

sure the kids could read our books and that I think she will say is is one of the most important parts

of her legacy so we have a really recent Judy Bloom experience which is the movie version of Margaret

comes out in 2023 I thought this is a really fun movie but then I realized reading your work that

I was the total demographic for it and kind of the only demographic for it that you know women

of a certain age that had read Judy Bloom as kids or teenagers we're going to see this movie but

actual kids weren't what do you make of all that like is it that the story is dated in some way or

what why doesn't this movie take off really good movie why didn't it work you know it's a good

it does work I think it works it's a good movie but it doesn't like seems to have broken through

and like reintroduced Judy Bloom to a new generation correct right far more people if they've

been introduced to Judy it's because their moms or dads assiduously read Judy to them read them

tells of a fourth grade nothing or superfudge the movie doesn't seem to have expanded her footprint

and and by the way again it's a good movie it's a good indie film directed by Kelly

Friman Craig of edge of 17 produced by James L Brooks and it's it's a quality movie Rachel

McAdams Kathy Bates is the grandma one of the safty brothers I can't remember which one as the dad

and but you know number one I think it probably I probably was like the with the one male who saw

it in the whole country I think it didn't do well with men it turns out like kids don't go to the

movies unless their parents drag them I think they weren't prompted to screen to to stream this movie

that you know was based on a book that maybe they hadn't read although Margaret still sells quite

well but you know not what it once did I think also people in the film industry have said you know

to the extent I've asked about this period pieces are really hard I mean there was a I'm sure

there was discussion about whether to update the movie to the present give it the same plot but

said in 2020 or 2010 and if there was such discussion I don't know there was but there had to have been

um I'm glad they resisted that from for artistic reasons and some of the plot points would have been

hard like kids know more about their period at a younger age and so it would have changed the plot

but it probably would have sold more tickets I mean the reality is period movies in addition to

being very expensive are seen as niche movies that a lot of people are put off by it you know madman

almost didn't get greenlit because people thought like who would relate you know it's the it's the

late 50s or the early 60s so I think that you know variety did a big article when the movie

didn't do well I don't want to say tanks but to do I'll basically like where's the love and then

it didn't get any Oscar nods like where's the love and so a little bit of is is a bit mysterious

there were high hopes but you know didn't put didn't break through so one of the things you end on

you have a really lovely uh very honest epilogue and you ask this question is there another contemporary

author who has so collapsed the distance between herself and her readership and you're talking

there about all her concern for the kids who are writing to her and her kind of continued sense of

mission and nurturing fellow writers there's a lovely story about tyriah Jones um who bloom

introduced to her publisher um and bloom gave you lots of access for this book but then she got mad

and kind of stopped talking to you or stopped with draw root drew from talking about the book and

what has that been like for you look we're we've both done a lot of magazine profiles of people

and as warm as they are and as as collaborative as they can feel they aren't really collaborations

and they're not meant to be there's an author and the author has a subject and some authors

they're subject to you know is geology and some it's pro football and some it's human beings who

am they're writing profiles of and so I've in a sense been down this road before so I always

expected that Judy would like parts of my book and dislike other parts and when I showed her a draft

that was exactly what happened and that's totally fine I also never thought that she would want

to publicize the book with me or even for me it's not her book and she can be very magnanimous

with writers whom she's discovered or whom she wants to help uh Joyce Maynard tells a very

moving story about how Judy was so kind to her when Joyce was the the canceled writer of the day

before that was really the term of art um and tyriah Jones and others I mean there are people who didn't

make it into this book who are fairly well known writers who told stories that were just the same

story so I didn't have room for all of them about how Judy did them a solid and was so kind to them

and help promote their career um but that said like I never saw any reason why she would be out there

promoting my biography of her um and so you know I'm if she's read the final final version the one

that's between hard covers obviously like I want her to like it as I want everyone to like right

but maybe there is something inevitable about some distance and actually in some ways it it means

I mean the book feels independent so who knows perhaps that's why I mean look as you know for

me read the book Judy started a memoir and then abandoned it and gave me the 20 pages of sort of

sketched out scenes from her her memoir which I incorporated which he wanted me to to to feel

free to use I wish she'd written that memoir like I would I still hope she writes it like what

that would be an amazing book is Judy's autobiography or memoir and you know the world is poor for

not having it there's definitely room for that book too in the meantime though um your book just

like was it a pleasure it had a kind of memory lane feeling to me um I love love children and young

adult literature and so I really enjoyed the chance to think about it again and also I thought your

analysis and insights into that in particular were um just so well done it's a very under theorized

part like when you think of how much today's universe let's say America today's America has been

formed by the mind and the creative genius of jk rolling and Suzanne Collins of the Hunger Games

and Rick Reardon of of Percy Jackson and I don't know who am I forgetting um the graphic novels

of rena tell jameir when you think of the the way in which our cultural landscape is is essentially

you know if there's any comment denominator beyond teller swift it's like four or five major

writers for young people rolling collins john green reardon you know you name it filipulman

and yet nobody writes about these people like it's it's interesting how under theorized they are

they don't get big biographies usually they don't even get big profiles you know like

Suzanne Collins created the Hunger Games I don't know the first thing about her

that's totally interesting all right mark go write those profiles I will totally read you on all

of those authors I've done my time I you know I the truth is I'm not that well read in that stuff

you're probably better read said my wife's very well read on it I'm not that well read on these things

I'm well read on that stuff I will totally there you go that's my my future um well thanks so much

talking about this has been very fun uh and the book is Judy bloom a life that's it for this

month's edition of Gabfest reads our producer is Nina porzuki Ben richman is senior director of

operations of podcasts nilo bell is the executive director of podcast at slate and Hillary fry

is the editor in chief at slate john and david and i will be back soon in your feed for a political

gap best until then for mark oftenheimer and for me um thank you so much for listening thanks mark

thanks that was fun

you

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