The writer Judy Blume lives in Key West—“an exciting place to live,” Blume told me, in March, when I visited. Chickens roam free, orchids “grow like weeds,” cats wander in Hemingway’s house, and disco plays out drag-bar windows, all in DeSantis-era Florida. Blume and her husband, George Cooper, moved to Key West thirty years ago, and have been doing their best to foster a kind of quotidian paradise, for themselves and the community. They live on the water and walk two miles every morning, with walking sticks, choosing their “A route” or “B route.” They have a favorite source of Key-lime pie and a coterie of friends. Blume co-founded and works at an independent bookstore, Books & Books Key West; Cooper founded an independent movie theatre, the Tropic Cinema. Books & Books has a robust children’s section, with a shelf and a half of Blume’s novels—brisk sellers, which she often signs. That week, her 1970 coming-of-age classic, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” appeared in a small display, in pink paperback, and at the Tropic a poster for its new screen adaptation, with a tastefully nostalgic seventies font, was in a coming-soon display in the lobby. It opens this week.
My day with Blume began at 8:45 a.m., when she picked me up in a two-door convertible outside my hotel. Cooper, eighty-five, was behind the wheel; Blume, also eighty-five, was cheerfully wedged into the back seat. “Hello!” she said. They pointed out landmarks as we drove to breakfast. “Here’s the cemetery with the famous tombstone that says ‘I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK,’ ” George said, looking pleased. I told them about an idea I’d had for an epitaph—“BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME”—and we talked about their spring plans: premières of “Margaret” and a documentary, “Judy Blume Forever”; a visit from Blume’s biographer; Blume being fêted at an awards luncheon in New York. As Cooper dropped us off at a Mediterranean restaurant, he smirked a little. “You know the thing you just said about the tombstone?” he asked. “That’s how I feel about all this.” We laughed, and then he drove off.
On the restaurant’s patio, Blume poured apple juice into her water. “My morning cocktail,” she said. Both she and Cooper have survived cancer in recent years, and though they’re careful—“George and I are COVID virgins!”—they’ve come to seize life’s pleasures. They traded their house for a sunny apartment on the beach, and Blume, whose books have sold more than ninety million copies, finally started considering some projects that she’d resisted for decades. “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” about a girl navigating puberty, friendship, religion, and a new town in suburban New Jersey (“Don’t let New Jersey be too horrible,” she prays), is perhaps the book that’s closest to Blume’s heart, and she’d long told agents that film rights were off the table. Over the years, she’d had some meetings—what she calls “Judy, sweetheart” lunches—that didn’t inspire confidence. Then she got a “wonderful” letter from Kelly Fremon Craig, the director of “The Edge of Seventeen,” whose producer and mentor was James L. Brooks. The team clicked, and the result is a sensitive, faithful, funny adaptation, starring the wondrous young actor Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret, Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie as her parents, and Kathy Bates as her irrepressible grandmother. It’s paced and styled for children of the seventies and eighties, who are welcome to bring any young people who might dig it. The time seems right: generations that grew up with Margaret, having been given the pandemic years to reflect on what aging and childhood are all about, can now safely reunite with an old friend.
That old friend is Margaret, yes—but also Blume. One of the great truisms and paradoxes of the Judy Blume phenomenon is that, for millions of fans, her books performed the role of parents—helping guide kids through coming-of-age milestones like periods, erections, and masturbation—while giving parents and kids the freedom to avoid discussing those things. Her books are wise but not preachy, light on their feet, easy to digest. Reading one a little too early isn’t going to mess anyone up. It’s more likely to give you clues to the human mystery—which will, in turn, help you decode your future.
Blume, born Judith Sussman in 1938, sometimes avoided Blumian topics with her parents, too. She grew up in a Jewish family in Elizabeth, New Jersey, with a dentist father, a homemaker mother, and an older brother. Her mother didn’t talk about feelings, but she was a reader, and “she let me read whatever I wanted,” Blume said. Blume’s first husband, John Blume, was a lawyer she met as an undergraduate at N.Y.U.; they raised a son and a daughter in a New Jersey cul-de-sac, where Blume tried her hand at picture books (“terrible imitation Dr. Seuss”), which were rejected by publishers. Then she found an ad from a press looking for realist fiction for middle-grade kids. She submitted “Iggie’s House,” a novel about a Black family moving to a white suburban neighborhood, and the editor Dick Jackson plucked it out of the slush pile. Jackson was “a stunningly beautiful man,” Blume told me: creative, idealistic, nurturing. Publishing “Iggie’s House” gave her the confidence to “let go” and write a freer, more personal book. The result was “Margaret,” about a sixth-grade girl with a secular Jewish father and secular Christian mother, who experiments with religion by having heartfelt chats with God. (“Please help me grow God. You know where.”)
Many Blume enthusiasts associate her with places where she has lived and set books: New Mexico (“Tiger Eyes”); Manhattan (“Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing”); Martha’s Vineyard (“Summer Sisters”); and southern Florida, where she spent time as a child and set one of her best novels—“Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself,” about a Jewish girl in postwar Miami Beach with a fervid imagination. “I think that the reason I like Key West so much is that I’m back in Miami Beach,” Blume told me. “I’m ten years old. Same bicycle: a Schwinn, with foot brakes. And it’s the same night sky, you know?” Like Sally, Blume had a brother whose poor health was thought to be helped by a warm climate. After the Second World War, her family moved to Miami, and her father, who kept his practice in New Jersey, flew down as often as possible. Blume began talking to God, making deals. “This was all about being away from my father,” she said. “My job was to keep him safe and protect him. I made bargains, like ‘I’ll get a hundred on my spelling test if you keep Daddy safe.’ ” Blume’s father was the more nurturing parent; his family had a history of heart trouble (“the Sussman curse”), and Blume worried about him dying young.
Both “Sally” and “Margaret” drew on these memories, but “Sally” was set in an era when a ten-year-old might worry that Hitler is secretly alive and lurking in Florida. “Margaret” was set in the comfortable present, amid suburban prosperity. Most people think of it not as a book about God but about an equally great mystery: puberty. “I wrote a first draft in six weeks,” Blume said. As a girl, she’d been excited to get breasts, get her period, and grow up, and her characters reflect this, tenderly and hilariously. At a Manhattan screening of the “Margaret” movie in January, featuring a conversation between Blume and Jenna Bush Hager, who’s developing a “Summer Sisters” series, the room erupted at the mention of a memorable detail: Margaret’s secret club, at school, and its boobs-enhancing arm-thrust-and-chant ritual. (“We must! We must! We must increase our bust!”) Blume said that she’d had to intervene on set when she saw the girls thrusting wrong, and Bush Hager asked Blume’s childhood friend, in the audience, whether they’d actually done the ritual as girls. “I didn’t have to!” the friend said, to mass delight.
After Blume and I finished our eggs, we walked down a palm-tree-lined street toward her bookstore. Chickens clucked around; workmen painted the porches of Victorian houses. “A lot of little alleyways, wonderful lanes,” Blume said, pointing out landmarks: the novelist Ann Beattie’s place, an inn where Charlamagne tha God, a Blume fan, had recently stayed with his wife.
Blume opened Books & Books in 2016, as part of the Studios of Key West, an arts center on the west side of town. “We thought it would be seventy-five-to-eighty-five-per-cent locals and a smattering of tourists,” she told me. “In fact, it’s just the opposite.” The store is in the Studios’ three-story Art Deco building, a former Masonic center. As we approached the big front windows, Blume said, “I have to show you Cardboard Judy,” gesturing toward a life-size cutout of herself shelving a book. Her daughter and stepdaughter had it made for her eighty-fifth birthday party. Non-cardboard Judy is a popular staff member; Cardboard Judy, one imagines, helps reduce selfie requests. “The new rule is I can no longer stop moving,” Blume said.
Inside, it was bustling, and everyone wore a mask. Blume showed me the Key West Literary Pantheon, a ring of about fifty names, painted below the ceiling, that honored writers with a local connection: Hemingway, Truman Capote, Richard Wilbur, Robert Stone, Shel Silverstein, Alison Lurie. Blume isn’t up there: the writers in the Pantheon—about whom Cooper has published a guidebook, available for purchase—are all dead. Blume knew many of them; she told me that her dream literary dinner party would be “all my Key West friends who’ve died, plus all the ones who are still here.” Around 1997, a publisher rejected “Summer Sisters,” and Blume treated her misery with a bike ride. “I ran into Bob Stone,” she said. “He asked me how I was, and I burst into tears. He patted me and put his arms around me.” Stone was writing “Damascus Gate”; both books became best-sellers.
Blume zipped around the store, tidying shelves and table displays. “This is the most banned book in America right now,” she told me, picking up Maia Kobabe’s graphic-novel memoir “Gender Queer.” “It’s lovely—a very sweet story about someone who finds themselves.” (Several of Blume’s books have been banned, too.) Other favorites: “Fun Home” (“this I adore”), Colm Tóibín’s “The Magician” (“it’s about Thomas Mann”), “Trust the Plan,” about QAnon (“George and I listened to this—very good”), and “Mother Bruce,” a picture book about a male bear who raises orphaned birds. She picked up Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.” “I hand-sell this a lot,” she said. “I have a thing about Roth.” Roth grew up near Blume, and their mothers went to high school together. “I always say that I’m thankful that Philip Roth wasn’t in Elizabeth when those plane crashes happened,” Blume said. Her most recent novel, “In the Unlikely Event” (2015), was inspired by the story of three crashes that occurred in Elizabeth in a span of three months, in 1951 and 1952, when Blume was a teen-ager. Roth “must have been in college,” she told me.
A woman waiting by the cash register held a copy of “Margaret,” staring at Blume from behind her mask. Blume doesn’t sign books at the store anymore; people fill out a form and she takes them home. “But even that takes me an hour a day,” Blume said. “It’s gotten way out of hand.” After the woman paid, Blume went to the children’s section and moved a “Margaret” paperback into an empty display stand. “I fought against a fiftieth-anniversary edition,” Blume said—emphasizing that a tweens’ book was fifty might not enhance its appeal. But she loved the new cover, which features a text-message conversation: on the right, the book’s title, and, on the left, the ellipses of a coming response. Every generation has had its own “Margaret”; this one, speaking the language of smartphones, draws kids into a rotary-phone world.
That world is a straightforward one—matter-of-fact, funny, conversational. “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret. We’re moving today. I’m so scared God,” the book begins. Margaret Simon lives on the Upper West Side, and likes it, but she’s returned from summer camp to learn that she and her parents are moving to the suburbs. Several events ensue, none hugely dramatic: Margaret talks privately to God; Margaret’s boisterous Jewish grandmother, who lives in Manhattan, regularly calls and visits, mildly rattling Margaret’s parents; Margaret is aggressively befriended by Nancy, a classmate who lives down the street; Nancy recruits Margaret into a “secret” club with two other girls, which they name the Pre-Teen Sensations. The girls engage in amusing rites (eschewing socks, confessing crushes) and anticipate puberty with charming fervor.
As a narrator, Margaret doesn’t demand much of us. She’s sharply observant, but rarely demonstrative or ambitious; she doesn’t have a burning passion for art or literature or sports. She loves her family, and her family loves her. School is fine, and so are her friends. But she’s still trying to make sense of it all. There are things that she doesn’t want to tell her friends—they all claim to like the handsomest boy in class, but Margaret likes Moose Freed, the fourteen-year-old who sings while mowing her lawn—and there are things that she doesn’t want to tell her parents, such as the fact that she talks to God. Blume’s prose, which does its heavy lifting behind the scenes, is airy and often dryly funny. (“Nancy decided we should all have secret sensational names such as Alexandra, Veronica, Kimberly, and Mavis. Nancy got to be Alexandra. I was Mavis.”) She’s particularly great at naming people and things, and her title conveys much of the book’s subtle magic. Margaret’s conversations with God are the kinds of openhearted expression that we all long for but might fear actually having, even with—or especially with—those closest to us. Such intimacy of feeling is also what many of us seek in a book, and, when kids pick up “Margaret,” that’s what they get.
After “Margaret” seemed to strike a chord, Blume went on to write “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t,” a kind of “Margaret” for boys; books in which teen-agers dated and even had sex; and impressively good books for grownups. But her books about puberty are the most piercingly memorable, precisely because they hinge on the thrill of expectation: bra shopping, buying pads from a drugstore and hoping the cashier isn’t a boy, being seated next to a crush and occasionally bumping hands. In these novels, romance and adolescence are mostly theoretical, yet suffused with consequence and feeling.
Blume is an empathizer, not a teacher. The idea that her books succeeded because they prepared kids for adulthood was never quite right, and seems even less relevant today. (A friend who recently broached a period conversation with her daughter was startled by her response: “Mom, I already learned everything I need on TikTok.”) What endures is the work’s honesty and respect for uncertainty. Margaret’s concerns—a changing body, a secret crush, a meddlesome friend—are relatable to anybody, and never fully resolved. Her conversations with God are like what Harriet the Spy writes in her notebook, or what I wrote in my cherished Judy Blume Diary, starting in third grade, or what thousands of kids wrote to Judy Blume herself, knowing that they could confide in her. (Many of these letters are preserved in Blume’s archive at Yale.) We want intimacy, but not too much—we want safety and privacy, too.
When working at the store, Blume often eats on the roof, a performance space with pink accents, a green turf-like floor, and a panoramic view. The island is resplendent below: palm trees, a lighthouse, Victorian porches and turrets. Blume pointed to the west, where an enormous red-and-white cruise ship loomed like a visiting skyscraper. “That’s what we don’t want here in Key West. That’s a two- or three-thousand-person ship.” The tourists tend to throng down Duval Street, the boozy main drag, but “the ones who come here, and are book people—you know, we welcome all book people.” A local paper lists the week’s cruise-arrival times, like a weather report.