Judy Blume was in the hot seat.
It was 1984 and the author of bestselling children’s books including “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.,” “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing” and “Blubber” was invited to appear on CNN’s “Crossfire,” a news entertainment show co-hosted by liberal journalist Tom Braden and conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan.
As the guest, Blume sat between them, smiling anxiously at the camera.
Buchanan kicked off the conversation. “Ms. Blume looks like a very nice lady,” he began steadily, before landing his first verbal punch. “What I wanted to ask you . . . what is this preoccupation with sex in books for 10-year-old children?”
Blume’s eyes widened as he continued, describing references in her books to menstruation, masturbation and voyeurism. “Why can’t . . . you write an interesting, exciting book for 10-year-olds without getting into a discussion of masturbation?” Buchanan asked her, evoking her 1973 novel “Deenie.”
She was nimble throughout the segment, dodging most of Buchanan’s blows. “Are you hung up on masturbation?” she asked him when he wouldn’t back down about what she described as “one scene in one book.”
But his point had been made to “Crossfire”s audience — Judy Blume’s books were bad for children.
That episode aired at the height of the mid-80s culture wars, when the right-wing movement that had elected Ronald Reagan aimed to roll back the changes unleashed by the sexual revolution. Blume was a frequent target — she was the country’s most-banned author for a time — but despite public pummellings, she and her writing survived.
Today, at the age of 86, Blume, who is now based in Key West, Fla., is almost universally beloved, with over 90 million copies of her books sold and multiple film and television projects in the works. A Netflix adaptation of her book “Forever” is forthcoming, while Peacock is planning a screen version of “Summer Sisters,” produced by Jenna Bush Hager.
Ironically, the choices that got her in trouble in the 1980s — her willingness to tackle controversial subjects, including puberty and sex, in books for kids — are exactly why she’s being celebrated now.
“She talked about things that were never talked about,” said Arlene LaVerde, who served as president of the New York Librarian Association from 2023 to 2024. “They were not talked about at home, they weren’t talked about in school . . . she talked about things [in her writing] that we wanted to know about but no one was willing to tell us.”
Born in Elizabeth, NJ, Blume was bold from her very first book, which she penned in her early thirties with two small children at home. “Iggie’s House,” published in 1970, confronted the issue of small-town racism head-on. Eleven-year-old Winnie Barringer is horrified when her neighbors try to prevent a Black family from buying a house on her block. After the family of five moves in, Winnie goes out of her way to compensate and make them feel welcome, resulting in some cringe-worthy moments.
“Say, are you from Africa?” Winnie asks the new kids cluelessly.
“Detroit,” one of them corrects her, through gritted teeth. “Did you ever hear of Detroit?”
The manuscript for “Iggie’s House” got the then first-time novelist Blume’s foot in the door with her publisher, but it was her next book, 1970’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” that established her as a guru for young girls.
At the start of the book Margaret, also 11, has just moved from Manhattan to New Jersey where she has to make sense of unfamiliar social dynamics — such as the fact that all the Christian kids belong to the Y while the Jewish ones go to the JCC — and her soon-to-be adolescent body. She stuffs her bra, peeks at her father’s copies of “Playboy” and prays to God that she won’t be the last of her new friends to get her period. “If I’m last I don’t know what I’ll do,” she thinks desperately, after her mother tells her some girls have to wait until they’re 14. “Oh please God, I just want to be normal.”
This was new territory for children’s literature at the time, which tended to stick to safer topics — things like hometown hijinks, a la Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books, and time travel, such as 1962’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” But that didn’t stop Blume from pushing the envelope. In 1973 she published “Deenie”, about a 13-year-old aspiring model who gets diagnosed with scoliosis. Deenie has to wear an embarrassingly clunky back brace, which upsets her. To soothe herself while lying in bed at night, she touches her “special place.”
If that’s not clear enough to readers, Deenie attends family life classes where the teacher, named Mrs. Rappoport, talks frankly to her young teenage students about sexuality.
“Does anyone know the word for stimulating our genitals?” Mrs. Rappoport asks her class in response to an anonymous question. When one kid shyly offers up the answer, she confirms that yes, it’s called masturbation and “it’s normal and harmless to masturbate.”
“Deenie” flew under the radar at first but as time went on and Blume got more popular, scenes like this one came back to bite her. By 1984, Buchanan was far from the only conservative critic of Blume’s. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority made it clear that they couldn’t stand her. Anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly circulated a pamphlet titled “How to Rid Your Schools and Libraries of Judy Blume Books.”
Back then — much like today — there was fierce debate about what kind of material belonged in stories for kids.
But now, Blume’s most diehard fans are all grown up.
Adults who loved Blume’s books in the 70s, 80s and 90s all say the same thing — that she taught them stuff they couldn’t learn anywhere else. While even the topic of sex education in public schools was enough to get parents and educators red-faced and riled up, Blume was writing novels like 1975’s “Forever,” about an upstanding senior in high school named Katherine who falls in love for the first time, and loses her virginity to her boyfriend (after taking a trip to Planned Parenthood to get a prescription for the birth control pill).
Through her writing, Blume “has been the pre-eminent advocate for a more explicit kind of sex education that acknowledges teenager’s sexual autonomy, sexual lives,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, author of “Too Hot To Handle: A Global History of Sex Education.” That position made her some notable enemies in the 80s, but it has also earned her hero status in 2024.
In fact, nostalgic readers — many of whom still consider Blume to be something akin to a surrogate mom — think so highly of her that even now that she’s in her mid-80s, she’s still expected to embody progressive ideals
.
In April 2023, Blume expressed her support in an interview for fellow blockbuster author J.K. Rowling, who has faced repeated backlash for her views against transgender rights.
Immediately, social media erupted with lamentations that leftie icon Blume might share her opinions. It wasn’t long before Blume herself took to X (then Twitter) to clarify her position. “I wholly support the trans community. My point, which was taken out of context, is that I can empathize with a writer — or person — who has been harassed online,” Blume wrote. “Anything to the contrary is total bulls–t.”
This promptly shut down her critics. By now Blume, who has spent fifty years in the public eye and who recently won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle, understands the enduring power of her platform.
“How I wish that reading could be celebrated in every house, in every school, at every age,” she said in her bubbly acceptance speech, which she filmed at her home in Key West, Fla. “Because reading and thinking and ideas are always a good thing.”
Rachelle Bergstein is a lifestyle writer and the author of three books, including “The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us,” out July 16. .
