Column: Judy Blume and ‘Margaret’ rightly having a moment
Novelist Judy Blume and her simple depictions of menstruation, masturbation and teenage sexual need got here alongside just a little too late for me.
By the point her groundbreaking 1970 novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” grew to become common, I used to be in highschool and thought her books had been for little children. My mates and I, in spite of everything, had already handed round a dog-eared copy of Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls,” in junior excessive, so we had been past fretting about when our durations would begin and our boobs would pop. We wished to learn in regards to the fraught lives of Hollywood’s pill-popping sexpots.
Which is why it took me so lengthy to learn Blume’s seminal work. Two years in the past, I learn it with my then-11-year-old niece, who lives with me. She was not fascinated with all of the “our altering our bodies” books I saved throwing at her. “Nope,” she’d say. “Not gonna occur to me.”
Perhaps a superb novel would assist pierce the veil of her denial?
I’m undecided it did, however we did love the guide, and we found, to our delight, that it delved into matters even deeper than the physiological adjustments of the adolescent feminine physique.
“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” was additionally — and possibly even principally — a narrative about an 11-year-old woman caught between the 2 perception techniques of her dad and mom’ households: Christianity and Judaism. It was a few woman making an attempt to determine whether or not God actually exists, about her dismay upon studying that her mom’s Christian dad and mom disowned their daughter for marrying a Jew. She puzzles over whether or not she ought to select one faith over the opposite. “However in the event you aren’t any faith,” asks Margaret’s good friend, “how are you going to know in the event you ought to be a part of the Y or the Jewish Neighborhood Heart?”
In her quest, Margaret attends temple along with her grandmother, church companies with mates and, unwittingly, confession at a Catholic church (which she flees when she realizes she has nothing to inform the priest).
It isn’t till the top of the guide, when she spies blood in her lingerie, that she has an epiphany: “I do know you’re there, God. I do know you wouldn’t have missed this for something! Thanks God. Thanks an terrible lot.”
Ah, the peerlessly rendered narcissism of youth.
In a case of nice timing, one week earlier than the film model of “Margaret” hit theaters April 28, the documentary “Judy Blume Eternally” was launched on Prime Video. For this reason you’ve in all probability been listening to and studying a lot about Blume currently. Now 85, she is effectively overdue for this sort of consideration.
In spite of everything, her skilled trajectory completely recapitulates her instances. A Nineteen Sixties housewife elevating two children in suburban New Jersey, she was married to an legal professional who “allowed” her to write down so long as dinner was on the desk when he bought house from work.
When her first guide made a splash, she says, different mothers on her block resented her. As her reputation grew, her books got here beneath hearth for his or her frank strategy to adolescent and teenage life, and her marriage crumbled. She wished extra. So she saved writing, saved promoting books, which saved getting banned. She divorced, remarried and divorced once more earlier than discovering her soul mate.
The documentary consists of many clips of Blume’s interviews over time, together with a 1984 look on the political present “Crossfire,” throughout which the conservative pundit Pat Buchanan accused her of being obsessive about intercourse.
“Deenie,” her 1973 novel in query, is a few teenage woman with scoliosis whose domineering mom needs her to be a mannequin. At night time, to loosen up and fall asleep, the stressed-out Deenie touches “her particular place” and feels a lot better. That’s as specific as Blume will get.
“Why can’t you write an attention-grabbing guide for 10-year-olds with out getting right into a dialogue about masturbation?” hectors Buchanan.
The commonly soft-spoken Blume lastly erupts: “Are you hung up about masturbation? One scene in a single guide!”
I can solely assume that this sort of assault, this sort of consideration, has helped make Blume into one of many bestselling authors of all time: 90 million books offered, and counting.
Because the young-adult historian and creator Gabrielle Moss, one in every of many Blume followers interviewed within the documentary, quips: “Come for the feminine masturbation, keep for the empowerment.”
In 2017, Yale College acquired 50 years’ price of Blume’s writings and correspondence. At one time, she was receiving between 1,000 and a couple of,000 letters a month. She appears to have saved all of them, and a few are excerpted within the documentary.
Touchingly, Blume developed decades-long relationships along with her younger correspondents, two of whom the documentary tracked down. One, Karen Chilstrom, says Blume saved her life. She wrote to Blume in 1982, when she was 12, to speak in regards to the suicide of her 17-year-old brother. Later, she reveals to Blume that her brother had molested her for seven years.
“I simply wanted to have the ability to inform one other human being, ‘Look what occurred to me,’” Chilstrom says. “Judy was my final likelihood.”
Blume’s kindness is the emotional excessive level of the documentary: “Bear in mind, in the event you do get overwhelmed by your emotions, you may write about them,” she wrote to Chilstrom. “Whether or not it’s in letters to me, or your journal or no matter. Hold getting these emotions out.”
Blume has helped generations of children get “these emotions” out. The repressed adults (nonetheless) making an attempt to ban her novels ought to as an alternative sit down, shut up and really learn the books.
