5 Things I Learned When I Met Judy Blume

Hi. Did you know I met Judy Blume? If you’re a human, dog, or particularly friendly-looking maple tree I happened to run into over the weekend, I might have mentioned this to you. Judy “Stormborn” Blume, keeper of the sanitary belt, destroyer of book bans, and mother of the sex-positive coming of age, is tiny, lovely, and forever on the edge of sweetly smiling. She has superpowers of gracious awesomeness that made me suspect we’d be great friends if only I happened to be her Key West neighbor. I was granted 14 glorious minutes to talk to her about diaries, the life-saving power of writing, the MRS degree, and her wonderful new novel for adults, In the Unlikely Event. Here are 5 things I learned about the woman who introduced us all to a girl named Margaret, a wifey named Sandy, and a penis named Ralph.
(Full interview here.)
Yes, like Margaret, she kept a diary.
“But they were very boring, I think. Looking back at them, it was all little code words for boys and what we did. And rubber bands, I had rubber bands arranged so I would know if my mother looked. And I knew that she had, though she never mentioned it to me. But they were ’50s, bland teenaged diaries.”
Her rebellion against the idea of banned books started early.
“I was 17, a senior in high school, and John O’Hara(‘s A Rage to Live) came up on my reading list. This was a book my mother had had when I was about 9, and it was the only time she ever said to me, “Don’t look in this book.” So I went right to the public library and I was very upset and angry when the librarian said, “You need a note from your parents to read that book.” I told my family, and that night my aunt brought me her copy with pretend marked pages—she put paperclips at random everywhere. And I stayed up and I read the book and I was satisfied.”
If Etsy had been a thing in the 1970s, she would have been on top of it.
“I was desperate—creatively desperate (before she became a writer). I longed to have the creative outlet I had had when I was in school. So I made felt pictures and I glued them all together and I sold them, actually, to Bloomingdales. It was very exciting; they paid me nine dollars for each one. It was fabulous. So writing was my next career, when I had had it with the Elmer’s glue.”
The idea for In the Unlikely Event, about three plane crashes that occurred in her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in the early 1950s, hit her like a lightning bolt.
“Unlike any other book I’ve ever written, it came to me in a flash, all at once. I was sitting in an auditorium at the Key West Literary Seminar, and Rachel Kushner was onstage…telling how she got the idea for the book from her mother’s stories of growing up in the ’50s in Cuba. But all I heard was growing up in the ’50s, and it was like, “Boing! I have a story!” It came with plot, with structure, with the three families. I knew what was going to happen; I knew where it was going to end. Just…magic. Never happened before, will never happen again.”
And finally, one great piece of writing advice:
“You should never leave a book without a finished first draft. I think if you have a finished first draft, you can put it in a drawer and then come back to it.”
In the Unlikely Event is on shelves today!