Judy Blume on Her Last Book, Documentary and ‘Are You There God’ Movie

Prologue

At the start of the 1950s, in the suburbs of Elizabeth, N.J., a nearly teenage Judy Blume found herself at odds with the rhythms of her body.

She hadn’t inherited her Aunt Gert’s large breasts. (“My mother worried terribly that I would take after my father’s sister, who had to have bras made to fit her,” says Judy, now 85. “I always say she worried them right off me!”)

And she hadn’t yet started her period. (“I wanted it so desperately. But when I finally got it, I couldn’t tell anybody, because I had told them I had gotten it in the sixth grade!”)

She had discovered the joys of self-stimulation, but she was suffering from a lack of privacy. (“When I went to summer camp, it was like, ‘How am I gonna get through eight weeks here and never touch my special place?’”)

There were consolations along the way. Her friends had bigger chests than hers, sure, but they were kind and honest, and all just as keen as she was to discuss things like masturbation, even if they hadn’t learned the word yet. And her monthly bleeds did eventually come. But more on that later.

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Chapter 1

In the courtyard café of Books & Books, a long-standing indie shop in Miami, a bespectacled man takes notice as I scrawl some last-minute thoughts in my notebook. “Are you writing the next great American novel?” he asks.

“No, but I’m here to meet someone who already has,” I tell him. The man — who introduces himself as Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of the store — knows who I mean. He knows Judy well, as she and George Cooper, her husband of 43 years, run a Books & Books store near their home in Key West.

Judy sees me before I see her. Having been given a mission by her publicists to find the reporter in the yellow dress, she announces her arrival, fist-pumping, “Yellow dress! Yellow dress! Yellow dress!” George trails behind her as she comes to greet me and Mitchell.

Judy gushes about what a wonderful mentor Mitchell has been in the art of bookselling, and Mitchell returns the favor: “Theirs is the first bookstore that really made it in Key West,” he says. “They have completely changed the literary community there.” She waves off the praise: “It’s all tourists!”

George is Judy’s third husband, and proud of it. Having laughed through his jovial appearances in the upcoming Amazon Prime Video documentary “Judy Blume Forever,” I feel like I’ve already met him, and I tell him so. “Oh, you’ve seen it?” he chuckles. “Well, don’t mind what she says about the other husbands, because they’re dead.” I can’t help but crack a grin, though Judy furrows her brow.

“But my children are alive and well,” she says. Her daughter, Randy, and her son, Larry, are products of her first marriage, to the late John Blume, whom she divorced in 1975. “I don’t like to say bad things about people. And that’s what I try to explain to my daughter. It’s not anything bad about him. It’s who I was, and where I was, and it happened to me.”

She moves on from the topic of her ex-husbands without deflecting, in a way that seems to honor their presence. Her grandson and his wife loved the documentary, she tells me. “They wrote me a letter: ‘Thank you. We didn’t know these things about the family. We didn’t know anything like this about you.’ They had never seen me young!”

This is who Judy Blume is. We’ve barely gotten through our hellos, but she has already led us into a moment of acute reflection and back out again. It’s not hard to imagine her as the young woman in the documentary, who churned out masterworks of children’s literature like the “Fudge” series and “Blubber,” and naughty adult titles like “Wifey” — all while raising two young ones of her own.

Since 1970, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” has taught generations of girls, myself included, about the menstrual cycle before they ever heard their mothers breathe those words. Gleeful preteens giggled and right-wing parents’ groups protested as 11-year-old Margaret and her friends exercised their chests, chanting, “We must! We must! We must increase our bust!”

But behind those scenes of pubescent angst and hilarity is a cutting narrative about a girl caught between her mother’s Christianity and her father’s Judaism, who tries desperately to relate to God outside all of that. That’s what the adults who grew up with Judy’s books ask her about now when they make the pilgrimage to Key West to visit her bookstore. And it will be sure to inspire quiet tears and tight embraces when families go to the movies in April to watch “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” on the big screen.

More than 50 years ago, the name “Judy Blume” became an enduring pop culture staple for the bravery it took to write books about puberty and sex in a way that no one else was doing. And now, between “Margaret,” “Judy Blume Forever,” and at least three more film and TV projects to come, Judy is becoming something of a movie star.

As we eat lunch, Mitchell stops by to ask Judy if she might be free for breakfast in a couple of days, but she’ll be having her hair and makeup done for an event at the Miami Film Festival. “The glam — I love that,” she says. “I never knew anything about that! The glam is going to be happening,” she giggles before returning to her grilled cheese.

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Chapter 2

Judy Blume still has questions about her childhood.

It doesn’t help that some of her memories feel fictitious, and I don’t mean because of her age.

“All I heard about my grandmother growing up was that she came to America on a banana boat,” Judy tells me. “And then I said that at my mother’s 80th birthday party. George and I did a little show, with music and pictures, and afterwards, my mother said, ‘Where did you ever get the idea that Nanny came on a banana boat?’”

Judy rolls her eyes now. “It was that she had the first banana of her life on the boat. She came from a shtetl in Ukraine. Why would she be on a banana boat? But when it’s been your story all your life …”

By this point in our conversation, Judy has gestured at her relationships to her parents here and there. She idolized her father; her mother was more complicated. I ask what impressions she had of their marriage as a child.

She searches for an answer. “You don’t really think about that until you’re much older,” she says. “They were high school sweethearts. There were people who wondered, ‘What were they doing together?’ They were so, so different. But they were going to stay together, I can tell you that.”

Because they loved each other?

Another pause. “I hope so,” Judy says. “I have a pretty little wall hanging, and on the back of it, my father wrote a poem to my mother, which I can recite to you: ‘To little Esther, sweet and fair / At 17, she bobbed her hair / If she thought of me as I think of her / The world wouldn’t be so bare.’”

Rudolph Sussman, Judy’s father, died at 54. He never got to see her write her first book. And while nothing could erase this tragedy — especially as his death came just five weeks before her first wedding — she had been expecting it all her life.

There was a period in Judy’s adolescence when she was separated from her father: Her brother had a serious kidney infection that necessitated a warmer climate, so the family moved to Miami, leaving Rudy behind in New Jersey to maintain his dental practice.

But Rudy was the youngest of seven siblings who all died young. It worried Judy sick. “Being apart, I decided it was up to me to keep my father safe,” she says. “What a burden, right, for a 9-year-old kid?”

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She turned to a higher power.

“There were a lot of bargains involved,” she says. “‘I’ll do this, if you do that. I’ll get a 100 on my spelling test, if you keep Daddy safe.’ That was my private, special relationship with God. It had nothing to do with organized religion. It never happened in a synagogue. It was just me and God.”

After two years in Miami, father and daughter reunited and that desperation faded — resurfacing in novel form, of course, decades later when Judy wrote “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”

“When I look back at it now, I think the wonder of it is that I didn’t become so ritualistic. I had to say the little prayer that I invented a certain number of times a day, and that’s ritualistic. But ritualistic kids are kids who become anorexic, or …” She doesn’t finish the thought. “I was so lucky that when I went back home in fifth grade, that was the end of it.”

Essie didn’t get off so easily.

“I was thinking about this the other night, how they have meds for that now. For when you leave your apartment, and you don’t remember if you turned the stove off,” Judy says. “My mother was ritualistic — OCD, probably. She had to go back inside three times to check and make sure. She told me that every night before she went to sleep, she had to think of all the terrible things that could happen to her loved ones, and then they wouldn’t happen. A hard way to go through life.”

There were moments of relief, however. “I always felt my mother was more relaxed in Miami Beach,” Judy recalls. “And maybe that’s not a good sign, because why would that be? My father wasn’t there …”

Sitting across from Judy, a literary hero pondering the highs and lows of her youth, it’s not her famous courage or candidness that strikes me most — it’s her curiosity.

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Chapter 3

In 2018, George turned yellow.

“As yellow as your dress,” Judy tells me. It was pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest diagnoses a person can get. Miraculously, he recovered. But not without a round of chemotherapy and a long spell of rest, during which he and Judy spent a lot more time than usual in front of the TV.

Judy had hung up her author’s hat in 2015 with “In the Unlikely Event.” Inspired by the bizarre succession of three plane crashes that happened in just 58 days while she was growing up in Elizabeth, Judy calls that last book the story she was born to tell. And no, she doesn’t miss writing: “Never. I never ever miss it. Isn’t that funny? It was my life for so long, and it changed my life, and it gave me my life, but no. I don’t mean to be Philip Roth about it, but I understood what he was saying,” she says. (Four years before his death, Roth said, “I did what I did and it’s done. There’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction.”)

So during her husband’s illness, Judy’s on-screen discoveries became a new favorite way to pass the time. Somewhere in between episodes of “Un Village Français,” Judy found herself wanting to work again.

She told her agent that she was finally ready to sell the rights to some of her books, but that “Margaret” was off the table. “And then I got this letter from Kelly,” Judy says, smiling.

The beauty of writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s prose was enough to keep Judy from tossing the letter like she had done to so many “Margaret” inquiries over the decades. And it didn’t hurt that Kelly’s mentor, the legendary filmmaker James L. Brooks, wanted to come onboard as executive producer. But the linchpin, Judy says, is that Kelly was the first suitor whose work she’d already seen. She loved “The Edge of Seventeen,” Kelly’s 2016 feature debut.

Within a week, Kelly and Jim were on a plane to Key West. Judy picked them up from the airport in her Mini Cooper. “We talked and talked and talked,” Judy says. She’d been wrong: “Margaret” was adaptable after all. She says that when it comes to making movies out of books, there’s never been an author happier than she is.

There’s a reason that we still read Judy Blume. (And why big names like Jenna Bush Hager, Mara Brock Akil and the Russo brothers have joined Kelly in bringing Judy’s work to the screen, developing projects inspired by “Summer Sisters,” “Forever” and the “Fudge” series, respectively.)

“At that age, there’s so much uncertainty. The ground is shifting under your feet. It would make perfect sense to reach out for something that feels solid,” Kelly says. Judy’s fluid, ambivalent take on religion is part of why Kelly wanted to make the movie. “I love that Margaret doesn’t know what she believes about all of it.”

Judy taught a lot of people that they’ll never know everything. That your body will change, and so will your heart, so it’s OK to change your mind.

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Epilogue

When I ask Judy about death, she smiles.

“George and I talk about it all the time. When you get to a certain age, you wonder. You say what you would like. ‘Please, take me to Switzerland and get me the drink,’” she says, referencing “In Love,” Amy Bloom’s memoir about her terminally ill husband’s assisted suicide.

Judy and George like to read obituaries.

“We read the New York Times; we read the local ones,” she says. “We joke. We laugh. We read the ages: ‘96! 94! That’s good. Uh-oh — 78.’ Things you don’t think about when you’re young. You know that it’s coming. I don’t want to be afraid.”

Judy and I planned for a two-hour conversation at Books & Books. We stay for three and a half. She’s tired, but she doesn’t show it. George does. “Tell her what the doctor told you!” he says.

Judy sighs. “He said, ‘You don’t look 85, and you don’t act 85, so they don’t treat you like you’re 85. But your body is 85.’”

I get it. But it’s hard to treat her like she’s 85 when Margaret is still 11 — and, when I’m speaking to Judy, so am I.

Fifteen minutes into meeting Judy, she asked me when I got my first period. I told her half the story: I discovered it during sixth-grade gym class, and it made me think of Margaret. Judy told me about hers: She was 14, on a lake trip with her friend Stellie, when she noticed something in her underwear. “But it’s like, ‘Eww!’ Because it wasn’t red,” she remembers. “It was brown!”

I should have known better than to keep the truth from Judy Blume.

I backtrack and say that, actually, mine looked wrong, too, at first — at the very mature age of 11 years old, I thought that I had pooped in my pants.

I feel like I’m at a sleepover, the two of us trading stories.

“That’s very smart!” Judy says when I admit that I threw my underwear away to hide my accident from my mother. “I just brought mine home and put them in the laundry!”

We shake our heads about how no one tells you all the colors that the blood can be, and we laugh, and it feels like she might live forever.

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Hair and Makeup: Obi Reyes; Location: Mr. C Miami, Coconut Grove