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Judy Blume and Her Legacy

48:05 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Judy Blume's frank books about real adolescence made her beloved, endlessly banned, and a genuine trailblazer.

  1. She wrote adolescence as it actually feltInstead of a big problem with a clean moral, she wrote about menstruation, first sex and grief the messy way kids live them.
  2. Banned constantly, and unapologetic about itForever was still on the most-banned list in the 2024-2025 school year, and Blume became a fixture of the anti-censorship movement.
  3. A late start that turned into 90 million copiesShe wrote nothing until her kids were in preschool, took six rejection letters a week, then published ten books between 1970 and 1975.
Executive Summary AI
  • Josh and Chuck open by comparing which Judy Blume books they each read as kids — Freckle Juice, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Blubber, Superfudge and Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret — and wonder whether boys reading them was unusual.1:58
  • She was born Judith Marsha Sussman on February 2nd, 1938 in Elizabeth, New Jersey to a dentist father and homemaker mother, and grew up anxious enough to develop OCD rituals she believed kept her father alive, while three plane crashes out of Newark airport in 58 days killed a hundred people, eleven of them from Elizabeth.6:13
  • At 21 she married lawyer John Bloom in 1959 a month after her father died of a heart attack, graduated NYU in 1961 with a degree in early childhood education, and only started writing once both kids were in preschool — collecting about six rejection letters a week for two and a half years before The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo and her first novel, Iggy's House.15:27
  • Iggy's House and Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret both came out in 1970, Margaret becoming a New York Times bestseller and Outstanding Book of 1970, and by her 1975 divorce she had published ten books, including Forever, which reads like a self-help manual for safe sex.20:41
  • That frankness made her one of the most banned authors of the 80s, 90s and 2000s — Forever was still on the most-banned list in the 2024-2025 school year — and pushed her into anti-censorship work through the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Kids Fund in 1981 and Letters to Judy in 1986, with roughly 90 million copies sold in 40 languages and a 2023 Times of London interview she had to p28:35
Key Quote
“She thought, I'm just writing in a very frank way about how kids really are.”
— Josh31:26
Key Quote
“Yeah, man, I just think it's so cool that she was brave enough to like write these stories, you know?”
— Chuck33:07
Key Quote
“Anything to the contrary is total BS.”
— Chuck40:42