When Blume started writing, the market category of young-adult (as opposed to children’s) literature was defined by politically motivated novels that took up social issues, such as drugs and teen pregnancy—“problem novels,” Oppenheimer calls them, using the terminology of the time. Blume didn’t write “problem novels,” he stresses. He quotes her in an interview, somewhat indignant, discussing how librarians spoke of “ ‘Judy Blume’s Book About Menstruation,’ or her ‘Book About Wet Dreams,’ or her ‘Book About Masturbation.’ ” “I don’t think of them as problems,” Blume said, when the interviewer suggested that each of her books “selects and deals with a particular problem or experience.” After all, many people engage in self-pleasure; many women get their periods; many boys have ejaculated in their sleep. Blume’s fiction addressed what was ordinary but largely invisible, describing it with humor, warmth, and care. “The truth was, Judy was more interested in unvarnished depictions of children’s normal lives than in imparting any outside drama,” Oppenheimer writes. She wanted to make people feel less alone, to provide what he calls a “pleasurable shock of recognition.” He also quotes her saying that “you write from within, you write what you feel.” Blume found a way to reconcile these motives—she exposed inner sensations that resonated with broad swaths of readers, becoming the bard of what was simultaneously unspoken and generic. She gave us a road map for the most universal things that nobody talked about.
Oppenheimer sees Blume’s emphasis on the everydayness of sex as crucial to her allure. She wrote in the wake of the sixties counterculture, publishing her first novels around the time that “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was drawing sex and body positivity into the mainstream. Her popularity stemmed from kids’ desire to read about puberty, he underlines, but also from their parents’ growing willingness to expose them to such literature. There was “a common misconception that her books scandalized readers (or, rather, their parents),” he writes. “While it’s true that her works have been challenged more than almost anyone’s (in part because they are extremely popular, so tend to draw fire), to focus on the would-be censors is to obscure the far greater number of adults for whom Judy’s books were a safer, less radical alternative to what was out there.” The menstruation scenes in “Margaret” reframe one of puberty’s gorier, freakier transformations as both ordinary and aspirational—aspirational because it is ordinary. Oppenheimer quotes Blume on finally entering her own menarche, at fourteen: “I feel like I’m the luckiest girl alive. It’s not so much that I’m a woman, as that I’m normal.”
Blume made growing up less alienating for her readers, but there were limits to her project of destigmatization. Her books, while mainly politically progressive, tended to center the bystander, not the severely bullied girl (as in “Blubber,” about a kid whose classmate is teased about her weight); the white neighbor, not the Black family (as in “Iggie’s House”); the kid whose friend gets up to no good, not the troublemaker himself (as in “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t,” where the main character covers for a shoplifting peer). She didn’t merely shy away from drugs and gang violence—the salacious stuff of “The Outsiders,” by S. E. Hinton, or of “Go Ask Alice”—she also largely steered clear of unlovely specifics about the Jewish community she came from. Her protagonists are materially comfortable, with adequate friends and sufficiently supportive parents; they’re quirky and complex, but they’d never star in a “problem novel.”
Oppenheimer derisively quotes an editorial, from 1976, in the Interracial Books for Children Bulletin, claiming that Blume upholds “traditional sex roles” and fails to create heroines “who want to take new, assertive, out-front postures on life.” The editorial, he argues, instrumentalizes artists by demanding that they “promote justice” and “offer role models.” If the biography has a critical failing, it’s that it brushes aside this critique of Blume’s work: that she was not boundary-pushing enough, content to redefine what counted as a regular childhood, shift its borders around, but not abolish it. Oppenheimer lauds Blume for offering readers an unadorned image of themselves and their lives, but Blume didn’t become America’s mom, as she’s been dubbed—a guiding figure for Molly Ringwald, Lena Dunham, Jenna Bush Hager, and tens of millions of girls and women—by representing the facts of childhood and adolescence with a grown-up ambiguity. She did it by portraying those facts—from underarm hair to girls being teased about their weight—as reassuringly typical.