Are You There, New Jersey? It's Me, Judy.

From The Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into New Jersey:

"Since 1969 Elizabeth-born Judy Blume has been the patron saint of the Awkward Years, otherwise known as puberty. Anyone who's grown up in America in the last 35 years has probably had a Judy Blume book on hand to explain something that parents often felt uneasy discussing.

Judy Blume, born Judy Sussman in Elizabeth in 1938, could have been one of the characters she wrote about in her own books, as she acknowledged in 2004: "I was a small, shy, anxious child with eczema, as fearful as Sheila the Great, as imaginative as Sally J. Freeman." As a girl, she was an avid reader--but not of children's books. The reason: "I never found my kind of reality in children's books. No child was anything like me. No child thought the kinds of things I did, leading me to believe I definitely wasn't normal." But with all that working against her, how did Judy Blume become the undisputed queen of all things preadolescent?

Became a Desperate Housewife

Inwardly normal or not, the young Ms. Sussman was determined to live a "normal" life. She became Judy Blume in 1959 by getting married (while still in college), and she was a mother by 1961. But by the mid-1960s, the 20-something housewife was going nuts in the Jersey suburbs. "I adored my children, but inside was an empty space, a gnawing, an ache that I couldn't identify, one that I didn't understand," she said. To fill that empty space, Blume went back to her childhood, resurrected her imagination, and began to write.

Her early career didn't start auspiciously--the rejections piled up. One of Blume's earliest rejections was from the Highlights magazine. The home of such immortal fare as "Goofus and Gallant" informed Blume that her work did "not win in competition with others." After that particular rejection, Blume literally hid in a closet and cried. It was two years before she sold her first book, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, in 1969.

Be Able to Corner the Market

But it was Blume's third book that began her transformation into America's Muse of Puberty. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret., published in 1970, featured a girl dealing with both her confusion over religion (she was the result of an interfaith marriage) and her anxiety over being a "late bloomer." Neither subject had been frequently or directly tackled in adolescent fiction; to hit both at the same time made a definite impression.

What Margaret did for girls, Blume's Then Again, Maybe I Won't did for boys in 1971. Her other books touched on unpopularity, divorce, losing one's virginity, and other overall awkwardness of existence when you're in the space between pigtails and cocktails. Because she wrote in the voice that kids could relate to, Judy Blume first cornered the market on adolescent angst.

Be the Target of Censorship

Normally, all the frank discussion of touchy subjects in these books eventually ran afoul of some adults. One night, Blume received a phone call from a woman who asked if she was the author of Margaret. When she answered yes, the woman called her a communist and slammed down the phone. "I never did figure out if she equated communism with menstruation or religion," wrote Blume. The prinicipal of her children's elementary school refused to put Margaret in the library because he felt the topic was inappropriate, despite the high probability that some of his sixth-grade female students had already personally dealt with the subject at hand.

By the early 1980s, however, Blume's books increasingly became a target for organized censors, who complained her books were inappropriate for children because of language and subject matter. Margaret and Then Again weren't the only targets: Blume's 1974 book Blubber, which featured a girl being mercilessly teased by her classmates, was protested because it didn't show the girl's tormentors being punished. Blume's response was that in real life, sometimes tormentors aren't punished--which was a lesson in itself.

As a result of the push to get her books removed from school libraries, Blume found herself near the top of the list of America's most banned authors--the second most censored, in fact, according to the American Library Association (Alvin Schwartz, of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark fame, is currently first).

Receive the National Book Award

Despite the best effort of the censors, Blume's 22 books, including three books for adult readers) More than 69 million copies combined. Blume's influence over entire generations of teens and preteens--and her fight against censorship--was enough for the National Book Foundation to present her with an honorary National Book Award in 2004, elevating her into the highest ranks of American letters with previous recipients such as Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, John Updike, and Philip Roth.For those still not convinced of Blume's importance, a 1998 article in the Boston Phoenix weekly puts it best: "Presumably, puberty would have happened without Judy Blume books, but there's no way to know for sure."

Books by Judy Blume
A short list of some of Judy Blume's famous works.

Books for the Pre-Awkward Years
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972)
Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great (1972)
Superfudge (1980)
Fudge-a-Mania (1990)
Double Fudge (2003)

Books for the Awkward Years
Iggie's House (1970)
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. (1970)
Then Again, Maybe I Won't (1971)
It's Not the End of the World (1972)
Deenie (1973)
Blubber (1974)
Starring Sally J. Freeman as Herself (1977)"

On a personal note, I read almost all if not all of the 22 books Judy Blume wrote. I loved them. They were true to life. They definitely appealed to kids and teens because they dealt with all the topics we wanted to know about (I got lucky - I have great parents who told me anything I wanted to know about but most kids did not). Here's the kicker - my grandmother, who clearly had no idea what Judy Blume wrote about, got me a set of the books - including Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. If she'd known what they taught, she'd never buy them.

Heh, heh, heh.

Let all censors out there chew on that!