Judy Blume: A Life

The definitive, all-access biography of one of the world’s most beloved literary voices, showcasing a life as triumphant and inspiring as the stories she crafted.

To know the name Judy Blume is to know and love literature. Her influential novels turned classics—including Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing; Deenie; and Summer Sisters—touched the lives of tens of millions of adults and children. For more than fifty-five years her work has done something it rewired the world’s expectation of what literature for young people can be—frank, candid, earthy, and unafraid to show the messier sides of humanity.

But Judy Blume was an unlikely literary icon. Judith Marcia Sussman, a Jewish girl born in New Jersey to a dentist and homemaker, was a restless, thirty-year-old, stay-at-home mother of two young children when her lifelong passion for reading turned, suddenly and surprisingly, into a talent for writing. What followed was a burst of creative energy unrivaled in modern ten books (starting with Iggy's House and ending with the incendiary Forever) in just five years that reshaped literature for generations. And the emotional core of her beloved books—death, religion, coming-of-age, sexuality, bullying—are found in the experiences she herself faced as a child, many of which have never before been unpacked.

In Judy Blume, journalist, historian, and longtime Blume aficionado Mark Oppenheimer pens a beautiful, multidimensional portrait of the acclaimed author through extensive interviews with Blume herself and unrivaled access to her papers and correspondence. Oppenheimer goes deep, exploring Blume’s middle-class, 1950s upbringing; complicated childhood; varied relationships and marriages; unabashed sexual experiences; bouts of heartache and loss; and enduring legacy as a champion of free speech and contemporary literature. Oppenheimer peels back the curtain to reveal the woman behind the literary empire in all her complex, multifaceted glory—a true gift for anyone who grew up reading and loving these extraordinary books. View Less