Full Bio: Judy Blume's Own Young Adulthood

0:00This is all of it. On WNYC, I'm Allison Stewart, just a reminder, tomorrow is the first day of April. So it's time to start reading our new Get Lit with all of it book club selection. It's Lake Effect by Cynthia DePri Sweeney. The story falls a woman named Nina, who is living in Rochester when we first meet her in 1977. She's feeling stuck and bored in her marriage, and after a friend gives her a copy of The Joy of Sex, Nina begins to experience an awakening and starts an affair with a neighbor. Years later, Nina must reflect back on the repercussions of her actions as she prepares for a family wedding. I will be in conversation with Cynthia DePri Sweeney on Monday, April 27 at 6 p.m. at New York Public's Library, Stavros Nyarkos Foundation Library Branch. To find out how to get the book, the e-copy, and to snag your free tickets to the live event,

1:03head to wnyc.org slash Get Lit. Again, that's wnyc.org slash Get Lit. Happy reading to you. Now, let's learn about Judy Bloom. Full bio is our book series where we spend the time with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Judy Bloom, a life was written by author Mark Arpenheimer. You may recognize him from his years as the columnist on religion for the New York Times. His subject, Judy Bloom, wrote 29 books and is sold 90 million copies and counting. Her works include classics like Are You There God As Me Margaret and Forever, as well as adult books, including Wifey. Bloom's writing has a candor and honesty that has earned her a legion of fans. Yesterday, we learned about Bloom's family and her upbringing in New Jersey and Miami. Today is a mix of the personal and professional. Judy Bloom didn't start writing until her late 20s.

2:04She was busy trying to be a wife and the mother of two children. She married John Bloom in 1959 while she was at NYU. In his book, Oppenheimer writes, quote, from the moment the Bloom's returned from their honeymoon, life was difficult for Judy. Let's get into Judy Bloom's life with author, Mark Arpenheimer. Judy had three husbands. Her first husband was John Bloom, who she married in 1959. Who was he? What did he want from their marriage? I say that John Bloom was the big five. He was a tall, dark, handsome, Jewish lawyer. How could you do better than that? I think of all of those. I'm only two. I'm only dark and Jewish. I don't know that I'm just tall, handsome, and I'm not a lawyer. But Judy really hit the jackpot and they met at a party when she was home, either for

3:09a weekend from college or a vacation. He was from a neighboring town in New Jersey. He was six years for senior. He was doing his army service, but had already attended law school. And they fell for each other. It wasn't one of the great romances ever. It was much more that they were attracted to each other. She was very pretty. He was very handsome. They were both bright. John Bloom was really a sharp guy. She was a big reader. He read less than she did, but he read. So in that sense, when you think of all the bad matches that were made in times past, or even today, people who get together because they're desperate, they want children, they think it's the right thing to do, and they have nothing in common. By those standards, this was actually a pretty good match. They had a lot in common, but it wasn't a passionate love story. They broke up at least once before they decided to get engaged. He didn't really propose. They went for a long walk and by the end of it, they had decided to make a go of it. And then they got married the next summer, which is the summer before her senior year

4:11at NYU. And pretty soon thereafter, she was pregnant and would, in quick order, have two children, have her daughter and her son. So it happened. It wasn't a disaster. And it lasted 15 years, which was, you know, all things considered pretty good. You write, though, that he sort of, he didn't, I don't like say, didn't care about his children, but there's a scene where his daughter is born and he doesn't really bring it up. He's golfing the next day. Well, I had a great interview with his best friend who was still alive. He was a, had been in the army with him and as a fellow lawyer in New Jersey. And they probably had, I mean, it's arguably they spent more time together than, than John did with Judy. They were just really close friends in a way that's fairly moving to hear about. But there, nevertheless, there were things they didn't talk about. And this friend reminisced that John was playing golf with him the day after the baby had been born. You know, it was pretty late in that maybe they were on the 14th hole out of 18 or something

5:11before John mentioned, oh, yeah, Judy had the baby last night. So he was not an extremely doding father. What I say in the book is that when people talk about John as a, as a father or as a husband, they always say dot, dot, dot for his time, like he was a good husband for his time. He was a good dad for his time. When standards were pretty low, he was pretty good. He was faithful. He was stable. He was a provider. He did come home at night and worked a long day. But then he came home. He wasn't out drinking or shooting pool or whatever. He was a constant presence. But he was not bathing the children all the time, reading them a lot of stories, playing with them all the time. I mean, and to be fair, some men were, there really were doding dads even in that era when men weren't required to be. And John wasn't. How did Judy cope? Well, she loved being a mom for one thing. She has no regrets about having had her children. She was not somebody who thought, oh, you know, if only I'd put off marriage, maybe I

6:14wouldn't have been saddled with these kids. She loved being a mom and she loved them. And for a time anyway, the role was the one that she had signed up for. You know, she hadn't been misled. She wanted to be married. She wanted to have these babies. She thought that she wanted this life in the suburbs. But pretty quickly, she found herself sitting around the pool at Shackamax and Country Club with the other moms feeling very alone. She didn't really know what to do with her time, especially once the kids were in school full time. Once they were, you know, in say kindergarten and second grade and they were off to school most of the day, she didn't have a lot to do. And she didn't have any confidence. She had made close friends in high school to be sure, but they'd gone off to their own marriages. And Judy didn't feel that she could share intimacies or misgivings or insecurities with these other wives whom she would, you know, stroll the babies with or sit around the pool with. They were acquaintances, but she didn't feel she could be her fullest self. So she had a lot of sadness. And she also had skin diseases.

7:14Her exema has always reared up at times when she's suffering a lot of stress or unhappiness. And so she was coping with a lot of physical pain as well. Judy Bloom really didn't start writing until her late 20s. How did she start? It's funny. I've talked to a lot of writers and of course I am one and you are one. And most of us know that people who end up writing probably do some of it as a kid. You know, it's it's always one of those things in the back of our mind. Judy had not thought about being a writer as a child. As I say in the book, she had fantasies of maybe being a movie star like Esther Williams, you know, swimming in the pool and coming out with her hair and makeup all perfect. She had thought about being a librarian. She loved the library, loved being, you know, in the stacks looking for books. Of course, being a teacher was always an option for a bright girl becoming a woman. And she had majored in education at NYU and gotten her teaching certification done her student teaching. So she had these other options, but she really wanted a creative outlet.

8:16She was home. The kids were off at school. John was working long hours at his law firm and she started by writing songs. She plays piano and she started by composing songs. And then she would find that after coming up with a particularly good melody, she would hear it on the radio two days later and realize that it was a song that was on the radio. She had she had heard it on the radio last week and it had stayed in her head and she'd written it down and thought, oh, that's my melody. But in fact, she wasn't composing anything original. So she scuttled that. And then she tried writing children's books for very little children. They're very Dr. Seuss inspired. And she illustrated them and her illustrations are not bad. She's a very competent doodler, let's say. And I looked at early copies of these books which are in our archive and you know, they're not terrible, but they're not as great as the stuff she would end up doing. And then she tried visual arts. She tried this art where she would cut pieces of felt out of sheets of felt and glue them

9:17to backing and make these framed felt designs. She ended up selling some of those on consignment at the children's department at Bloomingdale's and did that for six months to a year. But ultimately didn't want to do that anymore and also found that she was a little bit allergic to the glue. So then she signed up for a course in children's writing at NYU. A brochure came to the house offering night classes for alumni or for adult learners continuing education learners. And she asked if John would put the kids to bed on Monday nights so that she could take the bus or the train into the city and go back to school. And she ended up doing that for two semesters with this wonderful teacher named Lee Wyndham. And that's how Iggy's house first got drafted was as homework for that class. It's interesting though. She submitted for a long time and she got a lot of rejections initially. What publishers say about her early work? The rejections are mostly pro forma. I will say that as somebody who spent all this time in the archives, it's really painful to read someone else's rejections.

10:18And part of it is surely that it brings back memories of my own rejections. Every writer has dealt with so many of them. And with Judy, I think I must have read at least a couple dozen. She wrote a lot of short books for children that didn't get published at all that are in her archives. And then some are lost to forever. You know, where I'll see the rejection slip, they'll reject a book and say, we're so sorry that this book titled dot, dot, dot doesn't work for us. And then you look for the book, the book's not there. So some of her juvenile or early writing survived. Some of it didn't, but all of it generated these rejection slips. And look, they would say everything from no thank you. It's simply not our taste, our cup of tea to sometimes fuller comments. I think the most heartbreaking ones were when they would say, you know, we would love to publish this book. But we have a, we have a different book about a boy who's being an older sister that's coming out next year. We don't have room for two with the same plot. You know, there's a sense that children's literature is very formulaic. And if you have one book coming out about a soccer goalie breaking his leg, you can't

11:21have two. So, you know, you have to find your, you have to find your alley or slot to be slotted in two. But they might have just been being nice to her. It might have been that she simply wasn't there yet. My guest is Mark Oppenheimer. We're talking about his book, Judy Bloom, A Life. It's our choice for full bio. How was Dick Jackson instrumental in Judy's career? Dick Jackson was this wonderful editor who had started at one of the bigger houses and then split off with a partner, Bob Verone, to form Bradbury, which was this small, fledgling, just launched publishing house that was looking for new writers. And Judy sent her manuscript to him and for one of her very early books, I think it was Iggy's house that he first bought, which was before, are you there? Got it's me Margaret. That was her third book and her big breakout hit. And he bought it and he later said to her, I wasn't buying this book. I was buying all the books I knew you would someday write.

12:21And they just had this wonderful relationship. He was the editor that every author prays to get. He got her. He was supportive. He knew what she needed to hear. He knew what to tinker with and he also knew what to leave alone. He, for example, said that he almost never touched her dialogue. He said, Judy knows how people talk and her dialogue is true, is dead on. But he knew that she needed some help with structure and he would help her move stuff around. He also sometimes would have insights into her characters that she herself didn't have. So I'll give you one example that's in the book. Are you there? Got it's me Margaret. At one point, one of Judy's friends is on vacation. And I think sends her a postcard saying, I got it, exclamation point, exclamation point, meaning she got her period. They were all talking about, have you gotten your period? No, have you gotten your period? And Margaret gets this postcard from a friend saying, I got it. And of course, she's crestfallen because it seems to her that all of her friends are getting her period before she does.

13:22And Dick Jackson wrote a little note in the margins that said, is this friend telling the truth or is she lying? And Judy had this, you know, this epiphany where she realized, oh, the friend is lying. The, she, Margaret does get the postcard. The plot is right. But the motivation, Dick understood this friend's motivation better than Judy did, which is Dick knew this character would be lying about having gotten her period. And so that injected this other note, this kind of deeper layer and more drama into the friendship that wasn't there in the earlier draft. So Dick sort of knew Judy. He also knew her characters. He understood her. He read her mind a little bit the way a great editor does. And he ended up being this incredibly fruitful collaborator for the next decade or so. You know what that Judy Bloom wrote in the first person? What did this allow her to do creatively? Yeah, starting with Margaret, almost all of Judy's books for young people are in the first person.

14:22I think the exception is starring Sally J. Freeman herself, which I think is third person. But, but the classic books, you know, Dini, Blubber, Margaret, then again, maybe I want, et cetera are in the first person. And the first thing to say is it's simply fit Judy's voice, you know, every writer has to figure out what her or his voice is and how to pull it off and what it sounds like. Very few of us get there on the first attempt. We write and write and write until we figure out how it is that we sound most like ourselves. And here was Judy on her third book, realizing or discovering that she's very good at inhabiting a character and speaking in the voice of that character. And of course, Margaret starts off with this brilliant opening. Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. She's at prayer. And we're immediately inside this girl's head. We immediately feel that we know her incredibly intimately from page one. It's also quite radical in 1970, I think, to take this girl and make her the daughter of

15:24an interfaith marriage. Dad is Jewish. Mom is Christian. There's a lot of tension around that. It turns out in the novel and put her at prayer, have her talking to God in a book that is not explicitly religious, a book in fact that ends up angering a lot of conservative religious people. And here she is forging her own relationship with God as somebody who doesn't go to church or synagogue or anything. It's just like brilliantly creative. And I think that came out of the first person. It's interesting her first few books, Iggy's House. It's about a black family who's the neighborhood. Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret, about religion, about menstruation. Those are two of the things you don't talk about at dinner tables, raising religion. Did Judy know she was wandering into what could be considered controversial territory? Well, she's not stupid. She's very smart. So she knew. And she's not naive, either. So she knew. She was writing Iggy's House in the aftermath of the Newark race riots.

16:26And there she is, less than a half an hour from Newark. So race was very much on her mind. And I think that that book suffers a little bit from feeling like a commentary on current events. That book does hold up and white and black writers have told her over the years that it holds up. That it's not cringe-inducing to read that book now. It feels authentic. It is from the point of view of this white family. But it feels authentically from their point of view as they struggle with how to feel about racial integration and it's also a generational divide because the children are at odds with the parents, with the mom about this and with some of the adults in the neighborhood. It really holds up pretty well. But in some ways it was her first and last book that was explicitly a comment on current events. After that, she really did try to proceed from characterization first. That is to say she wasn't trying to write a book about menstruation or about rest development. She was trying to write a book about Margaret Simon and the stuff that Margaret Simon was going through. And one of the points I always want to make about Judy and some of these, quote unquote,

17:27controversial novels is the stuff that happens in them is not controversial or even abnormal. menstruation is completely real. It's not, you know, as opposed to if you said, oh, she's writing a book about threesomes or a book about, you know, heroin abuse or something like that, you could say here she's writing these books about choices that some people are for and some people are against. But menstruation is a fact of life in the truest sense. And so, and you know, when she's writing blubber, I mean, the fact that there are people who are overweight or who are shamed for being overweight is just true. It's actually not controversial or debatable. What was interesting was that she put these true stories in language that young people could understand could make their own in books that were marketed to young people. That was the innovation. By 1974, you note that in five years, Judy Bloom wrote 10 books. Why was she so prolific and was that a problem in any way?

18:30You know, when she came out of the gate, she really came out of the gate. I mean, she had a lot of pent up creative energy. She has a tremendous work ethic and that's something that you can't, you know, one can't say that too much that having a work ethic is probably the first most important talent for anyone who wants to be a published writer. Look to be fair, these books were not 500 page books. If you said to an adult author, like Jonathan Francin or Meg Wolitzer or Terry Jones or whatever, they're writing books that are 150,000 words, 350, 400, 500 pages, right? That's not what Judy's doing. Nor is she doing what, say, JK Rowling ended up doing, which again, is writing very long books with multiple plot strands, except for then again, maybe I won't, which really does weave in several different plots and is a bit longer. Her books tended to be fairly narratively contained with kind of one or two plots that proceed over about 200 pages. Still and all, she wouldn't have pumped out that many books if not for this terrific work ethic and the fact that she had this great relationship with Dick Jackson.

19:32So the second she finished one book, she was already drafting the next one. She slowed down a bit when she got really famous because, you know, when you get to the other end of these five years, say by 1975, she's answering a ton of mail. She's giving speeches. She's traveling around doing book signings, talking to librarians, talking to book clubs, you name it and, you know, talking to your agent, fielding calls from Hollywood. So she becomes a victim of her own success in that, once she's really famous, she becomes less productive. In 1975, Judy Bloom published forever a book about teenage life, sexuality, intercourse. And then it was marketed as an adult book. It's not an adult book, we should say. Why did the company go ahead and market it as an adult book? Well, this was a concession. It's not a children's book and it's not an adult book. It's probably her truest YA book, which is to say it's about 17 or 18 year olds and it was probably read mostly by 13 and 14 year olds, right?

20:34Children, children always read a little about, they want to read about characters a bit older than they are, right? You don't want to read about kids, you're 18, you don't want to read about 15 year olds and you certainly don't want to read about 10 year olds. You want to read about people a little more mature, having slightly more adventure, some experiences than you're able to have. So forever, and then later, tiger eyes are really her two YA level books, which is to say they're for, let's say high school freshmen, middle schoolers are high school freshmen about kids who are a little bit farther along in high school. That said, it was pretty clear in the mid 70s that putting out a book in which the two main characters have consensual, happy intercourse, consequence free intercourse was perhaps a bit much. And so there was a sense that Dick Jackson felt and that Bradbury felt, the publishing else felt that it had to be marketed to adults. So you end up with kind of Judy and her editor in the house all sort of at cross purposes

21:35about what to do with it. And even in the reviews at the time, you can find some critics treating it as a short adult novel about younger people. And then you can find some treating it as a very advanced, precocious novel for young people. So it's a problem novel in that sense. Yeah, forever caused quite a bit of hand-ring. Who are the first people to start targeting Judy's books? Well, very early on with Margaret, again, in 1970, we have high school principals saying, you know, that book's not going in our library. As the 70s ground on, there were more challenges to books. We don't have great statistics on this, I should say. The National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Library Association, both of which now do much better work about tracking how many challenges there are to books and what becomes of them. They're not as sophisticated back then about that kind of information.

22:36But we do have a sense anecdotally and from news reports that when you get into the late 70s with the rise of the more majority and then into the 80s with what became the Christian Coalition and the activism around schools, around sexuality, around reading, around, you know, quote, unquote, protecting children from bad influences that there are more challenges to her book. And ramp up as the late 70s go on and move into the 80s. But they were there from the beginning. And again, it was often at the school level or the school board level. You didn't have back then what you have today, which is states, you know, or the state board of education in places like Utah or Florida saying certain books like forever, for example, can't be taught in any of the state's public high schools. But you did have school level or district wide challenges. And to be clear, the challenges were not that it should be illegal to sell her books, I mean, 50 years earlier, even just 20 years earlier, you'd had people arrested for selling, you know, Lady Chatterley's lover where you lizzies in a bookstore, like the obscenity laws

23:40were such that you could be arrested for carrying adult novels that had depictions of sexuality. The Supreme Court had decided that that was too much of a burden on free speech. So her books could always be sold anywhere. The fights were really about what were school libraries and sometimes public libraries going to stock. Whether Judy Bloom wants it or doesn't want it, she's sort of a doyen of challenged authors. How has she handled it throughout her career? I think it became almost a second career. And I think in some ways, her activism, which she took to with Gosto and with a tremendous sense of purpose, was a drag on her writing for sure. We don't know for certain that if not for activism, she would have written more books in, say, the 90s and the Outs. But certainly it became part of her work balance, which was she kept writing, but she also set aside big chunks of time to, for example, do fundraisers for the ACLU and to aid them in their fight against challenges, against books and to promote the freedom to read. She did an enormous amount of

24:45Yeoman's labor with the National Coalition Against Censorship. And I don't mean just lending her name to fancy benefit balls. Like, oh, Judy Bloom's the chairwoman of the ball. She'll be there. I mean, you can go into our archives and find handwritten notes that she was sending to other authors to get them involved. Here she is writing to Stephen King and Kurt Vonnegut. And you name it, saying, we really need you at this event in New York or we really need $50 or I mean, she was one of the worker bees doing the kind of envelope stuffing literally and figuratively in the fight against censorship and for the freedom to read. So it's it's it became very close to her heart and it has it has been her primary expression of her citizenship in the guild of authors and writers. That was Mark Oppenheim, the author of Judy Bloom. A life our choice for full bio tomorrow will discuss Judy Bloom's experience in Hollywood and how she embraced social media.