The highly anticipated biography of one of the world’s most treasured literary voices, showcasing a life as triumphant and inspiring as the stories she crafted.
To know the name Judy Blume is to know and love literature. Her influential novels turned classics—including Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing; Deenie; and Summer Sisters—touched the lives of tens of millions of readers. For more than 55 years her work has done something revolutionary: it rewired the world’s expectations of what literature for young people can be—frank, candid, earthy, and unafraid to show the messier sides of humanity. But little is known about the real woman behind the iconic persona, and the unlikely journey of her literary ascension, until now.
In Judy Blume, journalist, historian, and longtime Blume aficionado Mark Oppenheimer pens a beautiful, multidimensional portrait of the acclaimed author through extensive interviews with Blume herself, invaluable access to her papers and correspondence, and thoughtful analysis of Blume’s beloved novels, including early, unpublished works that shed light on the pathbreaking writer she would become. Oppenheimer goes deep, exploring Blume’s middle-class 1950s upbringing, complicated childhood, varied relationships and marriages, unabashed sexual experiences, bouts of heartache and loss, and enduring legacy as a champion of free speech and contemporary literature. Oppenheimer peels back the curtain to reveal the woman behind the literary empire in all her complex, multifaceted glory—a true gift for anyone who grew up reading and loving these extraordinary books.
About the author
Mark Oppenheimer is professor of practice in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, where he serves as executive editor for the journal Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera.
Oppenheimer has been covering American religion for 25 years. He holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale, and has taught at Stanford, Wesleyan, Wellesley, NYU, Boston College, and Yale, where he was the founding director of the Yale Journalism Initiative. From 2010 to 2016, he wrote the “Beliefs” column, about religion, for The New York Times, and he has also written for publications including The New Yorker, The Nation, GQ, Slate, and many more. He created Unorthodox, the world’s most popular podcast about Jewish life and culture, with over 7 million downloads to date.
More recently, Oppenheimer hosted an eight-part podcast called Gatecrashers, about the history of Jews and antisemitism at Ivy League schools. He is the author of five books, including The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia and, most recently, Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood.