We at Ensemble have a lot of feelings about most things, and as a new generation of tweens enter their Judy Blume era (with a film adaptation of her 1970 bestseller Are you There God? It’s Me, Margaret out later this month, and Judy Blume Forever, a documentary on the author featuring commentary from Lena Dunham and Molly Ringwald amongst others on Prime Video from April 21), it appears our feelings on the author run deep. 

Piqued by an interest in how her seminal books seemed to speak directly to us as misunderstood teens, with a modern-day understanding that our issues were universal, a Gen X (Rebecca) and a millennial (Tyson) sat down to watch Judy Blume Forever and talk about the woman who helped shape their childhoods.

Tyson Beckett: Ok let’s get straight into it: what was your big takeaway after watching Judy Blume Forever?

Rebecca Wadey: I find the timeline of Judy Blume so weird. Because I felt like I was reading these books in my era. Forever was written in 1975, but I read it when an excerpt was in a Dolly magazine sealed section, just the sexy stuff. 

Someone in the group of kids I was reading it with at the bach told their parents and we got in really big trouble. Not from my parents, but from the other conservative parents. For reading porn. And this girl was banned from coming to our house for a while. 

TB: It’s funny that the written word could be considered porn. Was that the first time you’d read Judy Blume?

RW: I don't remember when I first read Judy. I feel like she was always in me. 

TB: They mention in the documentary that Forever, and a lot of her other books were released in the 70s during this period of huge societal change, including a boom in the divorce rate. That was a parallel in my Judy Blume awakening.

My parents broke up in 2001 when I was 10 and we lived predominantly with my dad who was at Teachers College. During the school holidays he’d park me in the library there with a stack of YA fiction that I guess was meant to answer any questions I had about all the change around me. 

RW: Was it It's Not The End of the World [Blume’s book about divorce] that you were reading?

TB: Probably? but more broadly about puberty and those ‘changes’. It was very much a “read this and you shouldn’t have any other questions” vibe. Judy talks in the doco about how her writing deals with so much of the stuff we were too shy to talk openly about. 

RW: I feel like there are so many parents that just outsourced parenting to her. I went through puberty really early, at 10. I got my period and I was well versed thanks to Judy Blume. 

I was a voracious reader and I wanted to read emotional things, I didn't want to read fantasy or dumbed down fiction. I mean, I read Flowers in the Attic when I was 10. So Judy Blume was a really nice, sanitised version of reality that really spoke to me 

TB: Do you have a favourite book of hers?

RW: I loved Deenie. That was one of my favourites. And not because of the whole masturbation thing, which I really hadn't cottoned onto until watching the doco. But mainly because she was this glamorous, beautiful model but had this disability and was trying to navigate life like that. It's not that it spoke to me, but it was just very engaging.

TB: That’s brought up [in the doco] too: that the masturbation, which is what everyone talks about, is actually only like, one or two lines.

RW: The footage of Blume on that talk show, Crossfire, having a big fight with the conservative media commentator is hilarious. She said, “Why are you so hung up on masturbation? It's a tiny part of the book”. She's so calm and articulate and she can just come up with a zinger.

TB: When she retells that story [in the doco] she makes it seem as if she really lashed out, but in actuality she only slightly raises her voice whereas the man looks manic in comparison. 

When she countered him, she asked, “have you actually read the books or did you just read a paper-clipped page someone put in front of you?” I feel like that happens now in public discourse. 

I think my biggest reflection on watching the documentary was that discussion about how the writing was so timely, and that’s what made it timeless. So many of the broader themes and issues from her career still seem so relevant: like book censorship and sex education.

RW:  That's when I got really confused about the timeline. When I read Forever it was probably late 80s. It must have been a good 10 years after publication that it was in this sealed section of Dolly Magazine I borrowed from the Hamilton Public Library. 

You couldn't put any teen fiction from 10 years ago in a magazine now, it would be so dated. I really hadn't stopped to consider until now that it was an older piece of writing. 

TB: They do delve into that some of it is quite dated (none of the mothers in her books have jobs outside the home) but especially how gender (and sexuality) were presented as a binary. That's not really explored, which Blume has also grappled with quite publicly recently.

RW: We should preface this by saying our beloved Judy Blume is not a TERF. What's your take on the gender issues in the books?

TB: Without going back and re-reading them, it’s hard to remember what you were thinking on first encounter. I suppose at that time I was less aware of the fact that I liked girls rather than boys. I do think it's interesting how she made specific reference to it being important that girls read about boys and boys read about girls.

RW: As a parent I gave my sons Judy Blume books to read. There's not much material for boys to read that's not fantasy or sci-fi or ridiculous, like Wimpy Kid. As I said, I was a voracious reader and my children don't read books and I find that so disturbing. I've spent hundreds of dollars on books for them trying to find the series that will engage them. 

For both of them, it was Judy Blume. For my youngest it was Superfudge and for my eldest it was the one where the boy uses binoculars to peep at the girl next door. Then Again, Maybe I Won't.

I think in terms of the gender roles in her books, it's obvious they were ‘traditional’ but my takeaway from Judy Blume wasn't so much about the relationships, it was about the loneliness of being a teen.

TB: In Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret she's talking to ‘God’ but it's more about talking out and processing those changes that are (or aren’t) going on with your body and realising that you're not alone in that.

One of the things that I found the most moving about the documentary were those letters her readers sent her as they found parts of the stories that they related to. Blume talks about how Margaret is searching for this non judgmental greater power to talk to so I thought it was so nice that she has sort of become that figure for a lot of her readers.

RW: Your takeaway was that Judy Blume is God?

TB: Yes! God is a woman, a white woman who lives in the Florida Keys!

But seriously I thought it was so wonderfully intimate that she writes back and is clearly touched by being involved in the lives of her readers. 

RW: I had no idea that she was so beautiful, which I know is irrelevant, but I never stopped to consider who she was. She was just a name. That's the thing I found most surprising: she was an enigma to me and yet so integral. Which is so different to people I adore now, where I know everything about them. If it's a writer that I'm into, I'm online, I'm researching them, I'm following them on Instagram and I'm seeing what they're eating for breakfast.

TB: That’s true, image making and personal branding has become so much more important in the publishing world.

RW: And they're so much more accessible. In Hamilton, New Zealand, in the 80s, I didn't have any access to Judy Blume. I would never think of writing to her. It wasn't important who she was. It was all about the books.

TB: If I was really cynical, I'd question whether it was because at the time she wasn't ‘anyone’ – to society and the wider publishing world she was a housewife in New Jersey who didn't have a following or a public face and her type of works weren't valued. She talks about how people would ask, “When you're gonna write a real novel?”

RW: I also think it's interesting that you don't get a sense of wealth. She's not rolling around in Harry Potter dollars. Or is she? She probably is now. But you know, she owns a bookstore.

TB: I mean… She owns a physical bookstore, in 2023, seemingly as a hobby. 

RW: It's fascinating that [until this doco] she’s kept very under the radar. Especially when you compare her to another successful children’s writer (whose name I don't want to speak) who’s constantly making headlines – and who some media have tried to align her with recently.

TB: Judy does speak a little to that [in the doco]: about the hate that she got during the Reagan presidency when censorship was rife and how that made her not be so vocal and instead work directly with advocacy organisations.

That recent experience must have been so fucking frustrating. She issued a statement saying she's not as up to date on ‘the issues’, as we all have a responsibility to be.

A quote I wrote down deals with the realism in her portrayal of sex. She said, “it doesn’t do kids any favours to present sex with punishment” and talked about how she wanted to instead present a picture of sex with “love and responsibility.” Again a very timely concept.

RW: Yes, there’s that ‘traditional’ depiction where the young girl having sex in books before [Judy Blume] would get in some kind of trouble or their life would go off the rails or she'd have to have an illegal abortion. It was always a morality tale. 

Right at the beginning of the doco, she reads a passage where a teacher asks the class if anyone knows the word for stimulating our genitals. She makes masturbation sound so perfunctory. That made me realise that she's influenced my parenting style big time. That's how I talk to my children and they hate it. I think that it shows that she continues to have influence over my life.

What do we think of the panellists, the talking heads?

TB: Well, spoiler alert, but the reveal at the end that all authors were people who had also had books banned was a nice choice.

RW: I liked the idea of seeing these writers from shows like Pen15 and Sex Education acknowledging that Judy Blume was the starting point and here's where we've taken it. We couldn't have gotten there so quickly without her.

Judy Blume Forever screens on Prime Video from April 21.