An Interview with Judy Blume's Biographer...

...by Judy Blume's biographer. (Yes, he interviews himself.)

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As a huge fan of Oldster, I was over the moon when they asked me to contribute. But I was, I confess, disappointed when I realized I was not to be the subject of my favorite Oldster feature, The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire. What gives? It’s not that I am too young—Meg Stone took the questionnaire when she was, as she put it, “51 … 52 in August,” which is exactly my age, right down to the birthday month. Obviously, Oldster wanted me not because of me, but because of my latest book, a biography of a much more important oldster, Judy Blume, who turned 88 in February. So, while I still hold out hope that I’ll someday get to take the questionnaire I love so much, for now I’ll play ball and write about Judy. However, I hope I can be forgiven if I do it in questionnaire form. Below, please find my interview with myself about my new book, Judy Blume: A Life.

How old are you?

See above.

Some other fun facts about you?

Let’s see … I grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, the eldest of four children. I am devoted to corduroy, the movies of John Hughes, and my friends. I play in a monthly poker game with eight other guys (we usually get six or seven per game), one of whom wrote the definitive biography of Bruce Lee. I edit a cool (I think) magazine about religion, politics, and culture. I am married to a wonderful human being, and we have four daughters and a son. Our dog, Archie, has been with us fourteen years but, alas, seems to be slowing down. I have been to 48 states—still missing Montana and Hawaii.

You’re a writer. What kind of reader were you as a child?

I liked to read, but I was not a voracious reader, not one of those kids who always had a book in his hand. Partly it was a matter of having other interests—boyhood obsessions included baseball, chess, movies, and, briefly, the long-forgotten video game console Vectrex—but partly it was a matter of not finding stuff I wanted to read. Back in the early 1980s, if you were a bookish boy, teachers and booksellers were always forcing fantasy into your little hands, Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander and the like. And I didn’t really enjoy fantasy (still don’t). I liked realism. So when, around the age of 8 or 9, I discovered Judy Blume, who was writing realism for young people, I was hooked. And I just started reading and re-reading Judy Blume.

Mark Oppenheimer in 2025. Photo by Lu Arie.

That’s interesting. What about librarians—did you ever ask a children’s librarian to recommend other realistic fiction? Maybe they would have pointed you toward Norma Klein or Paul Zindel or S.E. Hinton.

I did discover Hinton when I was a bit older, maybe early high school, and she was great. But no, I had no wonderful children’s librarian in my life. Quite the opposite. The children’s librarian at the Forest Park branch of the Springfield (Mass.) Public Library was a terrible human being, mean and spiteful. She seemed to consider it her job to keep us away from books. If we asked for help, she’d say, “Go use the card catalogue.” If we asked for a book that had sensitive themes (maybe like a Judy Blume), she’d peer over her glasses, assess the age of the child asking, and say things like, “You’re not ready yet.” Then she’d go back to her paperwork.

I’ll tell you a story. One summer the library had some sort of reading contest; if you read a certain number of books, you got a prize, or if you read the most books, you got a big prize. Something like that. I didn’t have a lot to do that summer, so I read all the time, and I kept a list. I was determined to win the prize. Around Labor Day, I presented the list to the librarian—I had used the proper library form and everything, and gotten my mom or dad to sign the bottom—and she looked at the list, sniffed, and handed it back to me.

“There are books here that aren’t in the library’s collection,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Some of them, my parents bought for me, or they were just in the house.”

“Well I’m sorry,” she said, “but the contest was for reading library books. Most of your books don’t qualify.”

To this day, I think she made up that rule on the spot. But even if she didn’t, you’d think she’d have had an ounce of compassion for a boy who thought he had a shot at the title but had to be informed was disqualified on a technicality. But I swear she enjoyed delivering the news.

What does that have to do with Judy Blume?

Not much, except that it’s one reason I just kept re-reading the tattered Blume books I already owned, rather than taking new books out of the library. It was Judy, plus whatever I could buy with the occasional $5 bill at Edwards Books, in the downtown Baystate West mall.

Did you ever read anything else?

Oh sure, there was other stuff: Hardy Boys mysteries, and I went through a James Bond phase, the Ian Fleming originals. Around 13 or 14, I began to get curious about the world, and read some nonfiction, haphazardly: I would sometimes bike to the bookstore in the Longmeadow Shops, and I remember buying, and reading, both Tip O’Neill’s autobiography and Lee Iacocca’s. Freshman year in high school, I read Stephen Carter’s Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, and sometime around then I read Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land.

I always did the reading for English class, and starting in 7^th grade I had good syllabi with good teachers. In middle school, there was William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and then a ton of great stuff in high school, from Homer to Shakespeare to Faulkner, Hemingway, all the way up through Wallace Stegner. My high school English teacher, Jane Archibald, has just published her first book.

So did you drop Judy Blume entirely?

I mean, to be honest, yes, for a time. It was years before I got to the books that teenaged me would have enjoyed, like Forever…, Wifey, and Smart Women.

So how did you come back to her?

When I was just starting graduate school, and thinking about also developing a career as a freelance writer, I didn’t know much yet about pitching stories; I thought that rather than send an idea to an editor, you should just write the whole thing and send it on (which is bad practice). Clueless, and trying to find stuff to write about, I hit on the realization that it was about the 25^th anniversary of the publication of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. So I sat down at my Mac Classic and typed up a thousand words on what Blume had meant to me, especially as a boy who didn’t like sci-fi and fantasy. And then I stuffed it in an envelope and mailed it to The New York Times’s main address. And a month later I got a call from an editor at the Book Review, saying they wanted to publish it. A huge break for me.

Of course, Judy saw the piece, and she sent me a very nice note about it. She even invited me to visit her at her place on Martha’s Vineyard, which of course I did. I have a recollection of calling my mother from the landline in my guest cottage and saying, “I can see Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer’s house across the water!”—on the other side of Lake Tashmoo. (Maybe I am misremembering, but I am pretty sure I was informed by Judy that it was the Nichols/Sawyer compound.) It was a heady weekend.

Did you know then that you wanted to write her biography?

Not at all. I was trying to figure out what kind of writer I was. My main subject, I thought, was American religion: the goal was to become the religion correspondent for The New York Times (and amazingly, about a decade later, I did get a religion column for the Times). I was in grad school for religion. But I had also spent six months before grad school working at The New Yorker and reading, in back issues, the amazing profiles by people like Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Susan Orlean, and Ian Frazier. The idea of writing a long piece about someone else’s life definitely appealed to me. But I had no sense of myself as a biographer.

Many years later, when I had already written several books, I got intrigued by the form, and for a while was doing research into the life of Evan S. Connell Jr., author of the great midcentury novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge. I visited his sister, I inquired about his papers at Stanford University. But that project never got off the ground, and I didn’t really think about writing biography again until Judy asked me to write hers.

Mark Oppenheimer’s children in front of the Judy Blume service stop. “Long after Judy is gone, her service stop on the Garden State Parkway will remind New Jersey residents of their native daughter.” (© Mark Oppenheimer)

She asked you to write it?!

She did. During COVID, I got an email from her one day, suggesting we talk about it. We had stayed a little bit in touch over the years, but not at all regularly. The email was a surprise, a delightful surprise.

What was it like, writing about a literary hero?

It was fascinating, but not because she was a literary hero of mine. By the time I wrote the book, she was somebody whom my wife—who does more of the reading aloud in our family—was reading to our children. I still had a sense memory of how much I loved her work, but unlike the legions of adults who still read their childhood favorites, I don’t do that. (Nothing against adults reading children’s books! I just have different literary comfort foods now.) So I was encountering her as an important and influential American artist, one who generously granted me interviews and who had saved over a hundred boxes of her papers and correspondence, a biographer’s dream.

Did you write the book you thought you would?

That’s a great question (you really are a great interviewer!). The answer is that I am not sure what kind of biography I thought I would write. Some biographies of writers focus very closely on the works—the drafts, the editing process, the final manuscripts. Others focus on literary culture—whom the writer was associating with, what movements she was part of. I think Judy Blume: A Life ended up being focused, in a close-up way, on the daily life of the subject: her childhood, her marriages, her children, plus how she balanced her time as a writer against other commitments, like her political work on censorship. Other biographers might have taken a more wide-angle view of American culture during her lifetime, used her as a prism to write about society.

But I think I made the right choices, by and large. To read about her Jersey childhood, growing up Jewish in the shadow of the Holocaust, the mores of 1950s America (dating, chastity, “necking”), her fierce determination to make it as a writer (one who got a relatively late start), the courage it took to leave two marriages (before finding true love with the third), the inspiration she took from second-wave feminism, and her triumphant joy when her books finally started to sell—I think that is to read about a century of American life.

This is a magazine about getting older, for people of any age. What age is your biography for?

Let’s put it this way: it’s about 400 pages long (including some great photos), and it’s being published for adults, but two of my daughters, ages 12 and 15, read it, and they say they loved it. (Each of them even caught a mistake in the draft they read! Mistakes that the author, editor, and proofreader had all missed.) So, truth be told, I can see it being the perfect mother/daughter joint read. Or father/son. Though my son is 7, so we’ll hold off.

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