Interview with Judy Blume
Judy Blume is an American writer. She is the author of 29 books, including: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (1970), Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), Summer Sisters (1998), and In the Unlikely Event (2015).
Judy Blume on Barbie…and Oppenheimer
Contents
[Interview begins with some audio difficulty]
Max Raskin: I guess I should make the joke: Are you there, Judy? It's me, Max.
Does anyone make that joke?
Judy Blume: You and everybody else.
MR: I have to ask: Did you see the Barbie movie?
JB: Oh yes, of course. I went with my grown daughter, and we wore pink. And we had a great time. She grew up with Barbies.
MR: Was it fun? What did you think about it?
JB: We both thought it was great fun. And I think that Greta Gerwig is just an amazing creative talent.
Ann Roth did the costumes for our Margaret movie, and she's very good friends with Greta Gerwig. She also did the costumes for Barbie.
There is a moment in the film when Barbie comes into the real world and sees an older woman sitting on a bench at a bus stop. And it is Ann Roth! Barbie says to her, "Oh, you're so beautiful." And Ann Roth, playing this woman, says, "Yes, I know."
MR: I also have to ask: Did you see Oppenheimer?
JB: Yes, I did.
MR: And what’d you think about that?
JB: I thought it was very, very, good. Great storytelling. I lived in Los Alamos for two years.
MR: What?
JB: Yes, I did.
MR: For what?
JB: Because I was briefly married to a physicist and he worked at the lab.
The marriage was a mistake, but that’s how I wound up in Los Alamos.
MR: What was it like?
JB: Let’s just say two years was enough. I had my kids with me, and they went to school there. That’s another story. But what was interesting to me about Oppenheimer were all of those names…and the history that I heard about constantly for two years.
We're away right now on vacation and our kids were here for a week. One of the nights we watched the Oppenheimer documentary, but Oppenheimer — the movie that's out now — it's just such an interesting way of seeing the story and getting to know the characters. A brilliant job.
MR: You lived through the 20th century and there were so many interesting characters and events — are you a history buff? Are there any figures you’re interested in?
JB: I find that the older I get, the more interested I am in history.
When I was a kid in school, history was not brought to life which is the way it should be taught. I can remember at NYU having a history professor who just had us memorize dates and events — that is no way to teach history or make history come alive. So much better to read a good book – fiction or non-fiction.
And of course, I've lived with George for almost 44 years and he's interested in everything. Living with someone who's interested in everything, you begin to absorb it all.
Reading List
MR: What's the most recent book you read cover to cover?
JB: Well, I should have a list because I'm a bookseller and I'm reading constantly.
I tend to read a lot of fiction because I need an answer for people who come into the store asking, "What's good? What have you read lately?"
Right now, I’m reading Richard Russo's new book. And I'm going to buy Ann Patchett's new book this afternoon. And I've got Ann Beattie's latest on my bedside table. Also, I often read ahead so I know that in September Nathan Hill’s new novel, Wellness, is coming out. If you were a fan of his first novel, The Nix, and I was a big fan, you’ll want to read this one. You won’t be disappointed.
MR: What's the way you prefer to read?
JB: I still prefer to read a book, that is, a physical book. I like it…I like the smell of books, although they don't smell the same as they used to, and the feel of books and I like being able to flip through pages to find something I may have missed. I’m a fan of great cover art too.
MR: Do you write marginalia in your books?
JB: I do not write in my books, and I don't take notes. I read for pleasure and knowledge.
MR: You said you inherited that from your parents?
JB: My parents were big readers and there were a lot of books in my house growing up. I was very lucky that way. And no books were ever off-limits. That's such a bizarre idea to me, that you would tell people that you can't read a book.
I live in that state where the man who is supposedly a governor is king of book-banning and banning everything else, including certain history.
MR: Is there any way you would think about writing any of your books different today? Do you think about that at all?
JB: I'm easy on my books. I'm glad that I wrote them. I don't know how I did it. Sometimes I'll read one and think, "How did I know that? And where did that come from…?”
The only book that I've touched was Margaret. Right after it was published, menstrual equipment changed, and it went from belts and pins to sticky pads. I didn't do anything about it until I got a note from my British editor and she said, "It's stopping the story, and it shouldn't be stopping the story. The kind of equipment she’s using isn’t an essential part of Margaret's story.” I agreed she had a point so I changed from belts and pins to sticky pads. There's been a lot of discussion about that online.
I changed the electronics in the Fudge books to make sense as those books were written over a period of twenty years. I don’t think I’d do that today. I’d let the kids figure it out.
Hillary Clinton, Sesame Street, and J. K. Rowling
MR: Margaret is as much a coming-of-age story as an historical slice of life of a certain time. Reading you and about you, you seem like you grew up a Philip Roth-Jersey- Plot Against America girl. Would you say that's accurate?
JB: Some of it. I love that book. I think it's great. I'm a big Philip Roth fan. He was about five years older than me which means he would have known more about the War.
The biography about him written by Blake Bailey, that was removed from shelves — Roth worked with Bailey on it for many years, and it was maybe the best biography I'd ever read. It was wonderful. I would never remove it from my bookstore.
And, of course, I'm very interested in Philip Roth. He's from Newark, New Jersey. I'm from Elizabeth. Our mothers went to high school together. They were in the same high school class.
MR: Wow. Did you know him?
JB: I never met him. It's one of the regrets I have. Had I met him, maybe I wouldn't have liked him. But I would have liked to decide that for myself.
MR: Have you ever met any of your heroes?
JB: When we moved to Key West, there were a lot of writers who lived there — Ann Beattie was one of them. And I can remember being at a party once and we were playing charades, and the answer was one of her book titles. I was always very shy around her. I can't explain it.
I tried to tell her once, "Ann, with all the writers here, you are the one that I've read the most." Really, we're contemporaries. She's probably younger than I am. I'm sure she is younger than I am… most people are today.
But I said, "You are the one that I've read and that's really been important to me." And so it's harder for me to get beyond that.
I did meet Bill and Hillary Clinton at some big event.
MR: Did you become close with Hillary at all?
JB: Oh, no. Not close. But I once interviewed her for Sesame Street’s 25th anniversary. I'd never professionally interviewed anyone. And so George got me a little tape recorder, and off I went, like Brenda Starr. Do you know who Brenda Starr is?
MR: No.
JB: Oh, it was a comic strip when I was a kid. We all wanted to be Brenda Starr, girl reporter. And off I went to do that. And I told Hillary, I said, "I've never really interviewed anyone before."
She said, "Just turn that on and I'll talk."
MR: When you read about people you are interested in, do you find yourself interested in particular areas of their lives?
JB: I want to know everything! I am just interested in people. That's my whole life…people — making them up and what makes them tick. And how they think and why they do what they do. I like to have characters in my books say one thing, and then do something else.
MR: Do you ever say one thing and do something else?
JB: I have no idea, but I'm sure I have.
MR: Are you a political person? Do you keep up with the terminology of feminism and the latest political definitions?
JB: Yes, I'm a political person. Do I think about the terminology of feminism? I don't know that I think about the terminology. Lately I've had to think about TERFs — that’s trans-exclusionary radical feminists.
MR: Do you have any thoughts on J.K. Rowling’s views?
JB: I am not a TERF.
MR: You shaped so much of modern womanhood…or at least so many modern women have read and probably been shaped by your books.
JB: And she was too. Because I met her once and she said, "Oh, my sister and I loved your books. And we used to get into bed at night and we read Deenie.”
I only met her once very, very early in her career. And I don't know what's going on there…I'm not participating in any of the online controversies about that. But I'm supportive of people who want to be whatever they need to be.
MR: How would you classify yourself politically?
JB: I'm a liberal Democrat.
MR: Would you call yourself a progressive?
JB: I don't know what progressive is anymore. I read about all this and I still don't know. My husband says, “Progressive” is the frosting when people are embarrassed to say they're liberal — or afraid they can’t win elections. I'm not embarrassed to say I’m liberal.
No. 2 Pencil
MR: How do you actually write? By hand? Computer? Typewriter?
JB: In my lifetime, we've changed from typewriters to big electric typewriters – I had an IBM Selectric – to computers. I do a lot by hand, scribbling in a notebook. But I work at a computer. I print out a lot. Too often, probably. And then I scribble all over those pages. I do way too many drafts since using a computer. When I started out on my college typewriter, I did five drafts. With Summer Sisters it was more like 25 drafts.
My best stuff, I think, always comes when I have a pencil in my hand. I like pencils.
MR: Do you have a particular pencil you like using?
JB: Well, no. But I don't like using the hard ones. I guess No. 2 pencils. I like pencils that you can sharpen, not mechanical pencils. We used to call them lead pencils.
MR: Do you use the yellow Ticonderoga? That's a classic — how I think about a pencil.
JB: I'm not fussy about my pencils. But they have to be sharpened and have an eraser at the end. I like the ritual of sharpening my pencils before starting a new book.
MR: This is going to sound like a crazy question, but there’s this whole interesting world of pencil sharpening. What kind of pencil sharpener do you use?
JB: I grew up like this [mimics using the hand sharpener]. You would get your teacher’s permission to go sharpen your pencil. But I have electric pencil sharpeners now.
Though this summer, away from my desk, I’ve been sharpening a pencil with a kitchen knife.
I also like uni-ball pens. Are you the one with the uni-ball pens? Did I read that?
MR: Yes, I love those. My favorite.
JB: I like my uni-ball pens, and so my secretary orders them by the box. I like the blue “ink” best.
MR: Do you eat when you write?
JB: Never.
MR: Do you listen to music when you write?
JB: Nothing. I can't have anything going on. If someone is talking on a phone, I can't write because I'm too curious about what the other person is saying. So no distractions.
MR: Where do you write today?
JB: Well, I'm not writing now.
MR: Oh, yeah. Sorry.
JB: So my last book was In the Unlikely Event. And I said that this is my last long novel. I'm not doing this anymore. I've said what I want to say. I mean, 50 years of writing is enough for me. And I love going out with this book because this book was so much my life.
Talk about history… it's not autobiographical, except that I was there. I was there, and I remember it all so well. In the winter of 1951, '52, there were three commercial airline crashes in Elizabeth, New Jersey. So that was huge.
I was 14 at the time, and I remember everything. The amazing thing to me is that I waited all these years, I had this story inside me, but it never occurred to me to write about it. And then suddenly, I did.
The Heroic Dentist
MR: Do you floss?
JB: Do I floss?
MR: Yeah.
JB: Yes. My father was a dentist.
Do some people not floss?
MR: Some people do not floss.
JB: Oh my goodness. Do you floss?
MR: I use a Waterpik.
JB: Oh.
MR: Is that okay? I do floss probably three times a week, but I try to use a Waterpik every day.
JB: I don't use a Waterpik, so I floss.
MR: You think I should be flossing?
JB: Oh, I'm not a dentist. I don't know.
MR: But you have great teeth.
JB: I have good teeth, but I was born with these teeth. I never had braces. My brother did. I just had good teeth.
MR: This might be an offensive question, but what is your view about Marathon Man – the Dustin Hoffman movie where the dentist is an actual Nazi? Was that a sore subject in your family?
JB: My father died a long time ago. He died in 1959, before Marathon Man. I think it did bother him when dentists were portrayed as anything less than decent. Like that play, Little Shop of Horrors. I love that play and I laughed at the dentist. But when I was writing In the Unlikely Event, it was my chance to make the dentist into a hero. For my father.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Judy.
MR: I want to ask you a little bit about religion. It's a big topic in your books, in your life. Do you have any religious practice?
JB: Only inside my head. No, I don't, actually. I was raised Jewish. I am a Jew. Proud to be. And certainly culturally I’m a Jew. We always celebrated Jewish holidays. We still do. I once wrote my own child friendly haggadah for my kids and nephews.
I grew up going to synagogue. We called it “temple.” A High Holy Days temple girl.
My father was raised Orthodox. And I remember when I was very, very small, he took me to a synagogue, a totally different synagogue, one where he must have grown up. But he couldn't bring me to sit with him. Because I was a girl I had to sit upstairs. I was scared. I didn't want to do that. I didn’t know the women. But yeah, obviously I've thought a lot about organized religion.
MR: Do you believe in God?
JB: There’s a line in In the Unlikely Event where the daughter, Miri — after the first plane crash, which she and her mother saw — is in bed with her mother. And she's talking to her mother and she asks, “If there is a God, how could He let such a terrible thing happen?"
And the mother, Rusty, is trying to think what can she tell her daughter. She says, “It's not God's job to decide what happens. It's His job to help you through it." Something like that. I like that line.
Some terrible things happened in our family when I was growing up. I grew up sitting shiva, everybody knows that. My father was the baby of seven siblings. No one lived to be 60, a lot of them died when they were in their 40s.
And when my 25-year-old cousin died of cancer — leaving a two-year-old — I think my father had just had it. I remember sitting on the stairs with him in our house.
We're sitting on the stairs, and it must have been around the High Holidays. And he said, "I just don't know if I can believe anymore. I just don't know." And I realized it was a really big thing for him to say that. To question god’s existence. A few months later he died suddenly. He was 54.
MR: Do you think about the afterlife at all? Do you believe in it?
JB: Well, I love the idea of it. Do I believe in it? Not really.
I envy people who do. When I was a kid I’d think of being up there on the clouds just floating around, and watching everything, though no one would know I was watching.
MR: So my wife's favorite book of yours is Starring Sally J. Freedman.
JB: I'm glad she likes Sally Freedman. I do too. That is my most autobiographical book.
MR: What was the impact of the Holocaust on your psyche, on your upbringing? Do you have an idea of what impact it had on you?
JB: Well, as a young child, a lot. And as an imaginative child, I did make up all these stories inside my head of being the hero, just like Sally. I wanted to go in there and do something. I wanted to save people. I wanted to stop Hitler. And after, I wanted a parade in my honor like we had in the streets of Elizabeth, New Jersey for Admiral Halsey. He was our local hero.
I remember after the War my father took us to meet some very distant relative. I had been told he had lived in a hole for years to escape the Holocaust. So when you're a little kid and you hear that, what you envision is a person living in a hole, that he had dug a little hole, and he lived inside it. I wondered how he did the things that you have to do to stay alive. How did he eat? How did he go to the bathroom? What did he do in that hole? And how deep was it? I'm sure now, he was someone who lived in the forest and escaped.
I remember when I met him, I thought he was very handsome. I don't think I ever saw him again.
MR: Did your family imbue you with a fear that it could happen here?
JB: They were more into reassuring me. But I certainly knew that this happened to Jewish people. And I was a Jewish girl. I knew that this was something that could happen, even though my mother always was saying that it could never happen here.
My father was an air raid warden during the war. When there was an air raid he’d put on his white helmet and my mother had to put down the black out curtains and turn out the lights. That was very scary. I was seven when the war ended.
My mother would say, “This is America, we're very far away.” But when you have a big imagination, you believe it can happen anywhere.
MR: Did you grow up in a Zionist household? Do you remember the UN vote on the partition plan in Israel?
JB: No, I was not raised in a Zionist home. I was ten in 1948 and vaguely remember joy at news of the partition and then the Israeli defeat over the Arabs. But what I really remember – for better or worse – is the novel Exodus and then the movie with Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. We all laughed at the casting but that didn’t stop us from going to see it. And Newman was partly Jewish we all told ourselves…which is true.
Santa Fe
MR: I want to make sure I ask you about the Dead. Are you a Deadhead?
JB: That’s funny! I am not. But my son definitely was during his teenage years. He followed them on tour. We went on a sailing trip when George and I were fairly new together. I think it was a five-week trip on a bareboat sailboat. There was no crew or anything. We — my 18-year-old son and his friend, and George’s 14-year-old daughter and her friend, and the two of us — did it all. We were our own crew. None of us had any sailing experience. The only experienced sailor on that boat was George.
And he was the capitán. And we had to follow his orders, which I didn’t like – I mean taking orders from the person you’re living with, the person you’re romantically involved with? It’s a wonder our relationship survived.
But the music of that summer, it was the Dead, thanks to the boys.
I liked it.
Not only that, when we came back from our trip someone painted a Dead logo on the side of my refrigerator and I never took it off.
MR: Would you consider yourself a hippie?
JB: No, I wasn't a hippie. That was really earlier. But I did live in Santa Fe starting in 1977. I had long hair parted in the middle. I wore jeans and cowboy boots or long tiered skirts with the same boots. That's as hippie as I got.
MR: But you would have been 20 in the '60s, right?
JB: But I was married when I was 21. When the '60s were happening, I was a very young wife and mother. My kids were born when I was 23 and 25, in '61 and '63.
I came from a very traditional New Jersey '50s marriage. Everything changed during those years – from 1959 to1975 – including me. My first husband and I were together for 16 years. He wanted things to stay the same. He was a nice man…a very decent person. But definitely not a hippie.
Now, George was once thrown into jail in the country of Colombia and when he found out why he was thrown into jail, this was translated — “Because He looked like a hippie because he had long hair.”
He had been on a river barge on the Amazon, where he got very sick, lost a lot of weight, and his medication was taken away from him. They took everything away when they threw him in jail. I guess they thought he was carrying drugs or something. He was not. He was actually a law professor at Columbia university Law School on an adventure.
MR: Do you think things will go back to more traditional marriages because people want and need structure?
JB: Yes, in some cases. Don't you? I think a lot of young people want that structure in their lives. But not all.
MR: Did you ever use drugs to write?
JB: No. But again, I had a son coming of age in Santa Fe in the late '70s. And there was a lot of stuff around in Santa Fe. I don't even do weed. I don't object to it. But it’s not for me. So no, I never used anything. I had enough imagination.
MR: Do you remember your dreams? Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?
JB: Sometimes. Not always. I went through a period once where I was writing them down. They were very vivid. It must have been a time of my life when I was more confused or had different things going on.
Have I ever been psychoanalyzed? No. But I have gone to therapy. For me, I think of therapy as something I can do when I have a real problem and I want to talk about it and get some help with it. That's how therapy has worked for me. (My daughter is a therapist.)
MR: We’re about to have a kid. Do you have any advice?
JB: Yes. My daughter says the best piece of advice I ever gave her is just enjoy your baby. Enjoy your child.
That can be hard when you have a new baby and you have to learn to adjust to the changes in your life but as that baby grows, just really enjoy your time together.
MR: Thank you so much for this. I hope I asked some questions you don’t usually get asked.
JB: I told Mark Oppenheimer — who’s writing my biography — that we were doing this and you were going to ask what’s my favorite cheese.
MR: I'm a real believer in old school, Freudian analysis and you didn't bring that up accidentally. So I have to ask you, what's your favorite cheese?
JB: Cabot's cheddar is my everyday go-to cheese. I'm lactose intolerant and Cabot cheeses say the lactose has been removed.
MR: Last thing — where are your glasses from? Because they're so cool.
JB: These are little readers that you can get online. They're called eyebobs.
MR: Are you interested in fashion at all?
JB: Well, I like pretty things but I don’t like to shop.