July 28, 2026 • 44 mins
Judy Blume is more than an author. She's a legend in teen literature for her frank and honest portrayals of adolescence. Today we pay tribute to her.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's just us. Jerry's on vacation actually as usual,
and this is stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
You should not. Have you read any Judy Bloom books.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yes, I've read a bunch of them. I was going
down the list checking off the ones I've read.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Oh, interesting, me too. I had a feeling you hadn't
for some.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Reason, because I'm soulless and robotic.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Meet Mark. Yeah, I bet you. We've read a lot
of the same one. So let's go over that.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I bet too. All right, now, okay, you ready, Yeah,
we'll say them all at the same time.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Now you say yours, and I'll say whether that's one
of mine?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
All right?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Freckle Juice did not read that one?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
I did? It was a good one. I'm going to
say that about all of them. Tales of a fourth
grade nothing.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
I did read that.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
I did two, but I didn't remember what that was about,
and I didn't go look it up. Okay, otherwise known
as Sheila the Great.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
I read that.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
That was a good one, blubbers the one aside from
are you there? God? It's me, Margaret that I remember
the most.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, I read both of those, and then I think
that was it for me, all right. I think I
read all the I read. Then again, maybe I won't, Okay,
And I also read Superfudge.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Oh I did too. I'm sorry I did too. I
read Superfudge.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Yeah, so I think I read six or seven of these.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
And I had a question mark next to then again,
maybe I won't. I may have read that one, or
I just may have been aware of it.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Yeah, And then the one what is it? Tiger Eyes?
Sounded familiar, but I'm not sure if I read those,
but I think it, like, you know. One reason I
wanted to ask because I think Judy Bloom and her
books get associated with young girls. Sure, and I was like,
was I an outlier because I read six or seven
Judy Bloom books and like loved them all? Or you know,
maybe both out liars.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I don't think so. I don't remember being particularly odd
or weird, at least in my elementary school, so the
fact that you did too, I would guess it was
probably fairly normal. I also read a lot of Ramona
Quimby books. Did you read any of those? Now?
Speaker 1 (02:15):
I never read those.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
I knew that the day I became at an adolescent,
I guess, uh huh, because that was halfway through a
Ramona Quimby book, You're Seven, and I realized I didn't
give a good damn what was about to come next
in Ramona Quimby's life. All of a.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Sudden, Oh no, that was it for me and Ramona.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
I always have fond memories of her. Those were great
fun books.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, well, I think it's cool that we both read
this stuff that our parents were. My suspicion is that
it was the same in my house, is that they
weren't paying attention enough, probably to say, hey, should you
be reading this book about, you know, a young girl
going through menstruation and discovering her sexual awakening?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Right exactly? My parents paid enough attention. I remember my
dad like some tense conversations I barely overheard. The only
word I could make out was fruity.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Oh man, goodness me.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
He was a real jerk. Grow now.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Yeah, well, here we are, though, well adjusted and kicking
button life.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, you know, it's great. Is I can't wait to
get the one or two emails really like that was
really mean of your dad to call.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
You fruity, right, yeah, get some support.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Right, he didn't. Really everybody, is what I'm trying to say. Okay,
I think you make a great point though, Chuck, Like
I think it's whether it's normal or not. I feel
like it was great that we read those books. They
were great books to start with, totally, but also like,
it's just so rare for an adult to have that
level of insight into what it's like to be a
(03:47):
kid growing into well an adolescent again, right, that's just
people have memories of that. I have memories of it,
but the vibe, the feeling and being able to convey
it again, that is long gone.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, I totally agree.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
So she was good at what she did and she
was a trailblazing pioneer of the first kind.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Yeah, totally. And when you say was Judy Bloom amazingly
is still with us in her late eighties, living down
in Key West, but I think she's basically given up writing.
She hasn't put out a book in a while. She
does run a bookstore down in Key West, which I
would love to go to sometime.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
I wish I had known the one time I went
to Key West, because I definitely would have popped in
to see her.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, so today we salute Judy Bloom. And I guess
let's go back to her childhood. Sure, because she was
born Judith Marcia Sussman on February second, nineteen thirty eight
in Elizabeth, New Jersey, just outside of New York, and
grew up in a pretty just normal, middle class Jewish family.
Her dad was a dentist, her mom was a homemaker,
(04:57):
and she you know, seemed to have a I was
about to say, a happy life. But she was a
fraught kid about some stuff. But not because she had
like some awful life. It was a pretty normal life,
but a lot of angst.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
It seems like, yeah, I'm fairly well earned. I feel like, yeah,
for sure, but not because her family dynamic was screwed up.
It was like her father was her confidant. Yeah, her
entire childhood sounds like a really good father. I didn't
get the impression that her mom was anything terrible, but
(05:31):
I think her father played a more prominent role.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah, I think such a But what her.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Mom gave her was the gift of loving to read,
which is man, there are a few gifts you can
give a kid better than.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
That, you know, yeah, no kidding. And I know you
and I have talked about this privately, but you know,
when Ruby was diagnosed with dyslexia, we were both as
avid readers, just you know, sort of afraid that meant
she wouldn't have that joy. And she's gotten over it
to the point where she's an avid reader and it
just makes it so happy. And you always wonder what
your kid's going to be like. And when I was
(06:03):
reading about young Judy Bloom making up stories like life
stories and backstories for her dolls and playthings and creating
characters and scenarios, like Ruby does a lot of that stuff,
and I'm always wondering if, like you know, she'd writes
stories and stuff like is that her path? And like
who knows, But you know, just like Judy Bloom, they
(06:24):
both had these active or have these active kind of
make believe lives, which I think is super cool and
healthy and awesome.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah. The thing that stuck out to me was that
she would take piano lessons and then whilst she was
practicing the piano herself, she in her head she was
teaching imaginary students like characters. I love that she was
giving them piano lessons yeah, and you know that's pretty
cool in and of itself. She actually kept a journal
a notebook to chart their progress the imaginary student. She
(06:56):
was teaching progress in her notebook, like that's how we're
find her imagination was as far as character development goes
as a kid.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah, that's super cool. And that reminded me and again
not to just keep bringing Ruby into it. But I
know you're a fan, so you don't mind. Yeah. But
when I took her to her first Hawks game when
she was like eight or nine, maybe she sat there
and I don't think I've told this before, but she
I looked and she brought her a little notebook like
she always does, just in case she gets bored, and
(07:26):
she was keeping notes. And finally was like, what are
you noting? And she had noted all the players and
all of their shoes and what brand and what color
shoes they had, and what number they were and everything.
And I just thought, what an interesting thing to do that.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, I mean I was never into that kind of
thing now, so I yeah, I feel like I'm definitely
looking at it from the outside in.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yeah. I just you know, when you're a parent, you're
always like, what does that mean? And like maybe one
day I'll look back and go like, oh it all
makes sense now or whatever. Sure, maybe she'll be an
inventory or something. Yeah, what's it called when you manage.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Logistics?
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, logistics.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
She'll be in charge of logistics of moving basketball players
around the country. Great, Yeah that's cool. That's a great story.
And yeah, I can't quite get it either. I mean,
is it like a calming thing?
Speaker 1 (08:21):
I don't know, I have no idea.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Well, let me know when you figure it out.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Like twenty years probably.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
So even though Judy Bloom was like she came up
with characters and had a very rich internal life as
a kid, she apparently never particularly aspired to be a writer.
She ended up wanting to find essentially like a creative
outlet later on, as we'll see. But as a kid
(08:49):
that wasn't she wouldn't like, that's what I'm going to
be as a writer. And so that comes later in
between then and now. But the opposite, so now would
be while she was a child, then would be as
she's grown up a little more. Oh man, you said
that she had a kind of a fraught childhood, and
(09:10):
as a result of that, she definitely suffered from anxiety
as a kid. And this is like nineteen fifties anxiety,
so like the real deal kind where you saw like
a psychoanalyst sometimes.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, certainly starting out in the forties when you're a
little kid, especially a Jewish American kid, and World War
II is going around, there was a big preoccupation in
her family and you know, every probably Jewish American kid's
life about what was going on overseas, afraid that could
happen to them and their family, that kind of thing.
And then really, this is so sad. She was always
(09:41):
just worried about her father dying because a couple of
her uncles died when they were younger, in their early
forties of heart attacks I guess heart failure. Yeah, and
she was just always worried about her dad, and you
know doing kid stuff like you know, making a deal
with God, like hey, if I ace this test, it'll
help my dad live. And just it's just so sort
(10:03):
of heartbreaking to hear that stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, and if that sounds a little familiar, then you
probably have read are you there, God, it's me Margaret. Yeah.
So yeah, that was a big deal. Like that kind
of guided her outlook, and that's a lot to worry
about as a little kid, right, totally. H So another
thing that happened. Remember I said her dad was like
one of her biggest, most prominent figures in her entire
(10:26):
life as a kid. There were two years where she
and her mom and brother moved to Miami Beach because
her brother had suffered some sort of chronic illness I believe,
and they were like, go to Miami apparently the one
hundred and ten percent humidity will be good.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
And her father stayed back in Elizabeth, New Jersey because
he was a dentist, so he had to stay dentisting. Yeah,
and that separation apparently was so significant that she developed
an obsessive compulsive disorder. Only would she, like you said,
kind of make deals with God. She would, you know,
(11:05):
maybe turn a door knob handle X number of times,
and as long as she remembered to do that, her
father would stay alive. Like that kind of stuff. Again,
we're talking about a kid who's less than ten years old.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah, that's a lot to take on. It just made
me real sad to hear that. But she also had
a few and you know, as we'll see, she wrote
a lot about stuff that she knew either places where
she lived, or about things that were you know, like
you said, and are you there, God it to me
Margaret kind of writing about that. She also wrote later
in life about a family who experienced these three plane
(11:39):
crashes sort of near their house that affected their household,
and that really happened to her, right.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, you know, over the course of fifty eight days,
less than two months, there were three separate plane crashes
from the Newark Airport, which apparently was like right there
that the runways were pointed essentially at Elizabeth. Yeah, and
a hundred people died from those three crashes, eleven of
(12:06):
which were like neighbors, friends and neighbors, like townfolk from
Elizabeth who had been on the ground in the wrong
place at the wrong time.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yeah. So that's obviously gonna you know, color young kids, psyche,
you know for sure.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
I mean, what are the odds of something like that happening.
I guess it was bad enough that they closed the
Newark Airport for a year and rebuilt the runway so
that they weren't pointed at Elizabeth anymore.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, that's that's terrible.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, So all those things together certainly like shaped her childhood,
her pre adolescence.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah, and then she like kind of grew up, like
her life was pretty normal nineteen fifties early nineteen sixties
type life, although she was a little more on the
alternative side. It looks like it sounds like she was
a bit of a beatnik.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah. I think she gravitated towards that, like when she graduated,
and she graduated, you know, high school, at the top
of her class, and then went to NYU, and then
there in the fifties at NYU, it sounds like she
was definitely kind of slanted toward that bohemian culture and
drawn to the beatnik types.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yes, she was hanging with Llewell and Davis.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Should we take a break, Yeah, all right, we'll take
an earlier break. It seems like a good college seems
like a good breaking point to me. Oh, I agree,
all right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
So we're back, Chuck and Judy Bloom is stuck in
college because we took an ad break, and we're going
to dislodge her. She's a junior. It's nineteen fifty nine.
She meets a guy named John Bloom. She was twenty
one at the time. He would have been twenty seven. Yeah,
he was already like well out of school, established himself
(14:02):
as a lawyer, and he said, hey, tootz, how about
we get married. And she liked that idea, so they
got engaged and they got married that year. Sadly, very
very sadly. I'm sure this hit her quite hard. Her
father wasn't there to walk her down the aisle because
like a month before the wedding he died from a
heart attack. He wasn't early forties, but he was early
(14:25):
mid fifties, which is still very very young.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah, I mean to see your fear realize like that,
like the one thing that she was worried about, specifically
the heart attack too, must have been devastating. So she
gets married. In nineteen sixty one, she grad graduated from
NYU with a degree in early childhood education, and the
plan was to sort of you know, you know, you
(14:48):
mentioned earlier she didn't want to be a writer necessarily,
and you know, one of the big reasons, because it
is in the nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties when
she was a kid, that just wasn't an avenue that
was as open to young women. It's a big reason
that se Hinton kept the initials se Hinton when she
wrote The Outsiders and all those books.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
You know, I didn't know se Hinton was a woman.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Are you serious?
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah, that's serious.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Yeah. I thought c Hinton was a teenage girl when
she wrote The Outsiders.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I had no idea. Wow, yeah, yeah, I thought that
was Steve and Edie Hinton.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
That's why she did it. I mean it worked. I
guess she's like, I got to be able to fool
Josh Clark.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
No, but I mean like, I had no idea. This
is literally the first time I'm hearing that. It's not
even like, oh that vaguely rings a bell. I have
never heard that in my entire life.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Well, there you have it. She was a teenage girl
in high school when she wrote The Outsiders.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
That's really cool.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
But again, that's why she kept the name se Hinton
because just publishing wasn't so open to young women writing books.
So that's why Judy Bloom didn't. And when she was
graduating college, she was just sort of on that track.
She was like, I'm going to get my degree, I'm
going to get married, which I already did before I graduated.
I'm gonna have kids and be a homemaker, and within
(16:05):
a couple of years of graduating, she had a daughter
named Randy Lee and then a son named Lawrence Andrew
and was you know, very happily it seems, back in
the New Jersey suburbs. Yep, while her husband was attorneying.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Yes, so I had said though that she was. She
started writing because she was like, I need to do
something else besides just like raise kids and sit at
home and dust. That just was not enough to fulfill
her as a person. So once both of her kids
were in preschool, she was like, I'll write some books
(16:38):
for my kids, or at least my kids friends if
the kids don't like it, she started creating picture books.
Essentially the first one she came up was, or at
least the first one. Her first published book was a
children's picture book called The One in the Middle is
the Green Kangaroo, which is a great, great children's book name.
But that didn't come like easy. That wasn't like a
(17:01):
you know, first try. And she she got her big break.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Yeah, I mean it's I think she went a couple
of years, like two two and a half years, getting
you know, rejection letter after rejection letter. I think they
dug who helped us with this one.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Julia.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, Julia found that she was getting like six no
letters per week before she became like an overnight success.
You know, that's how the media like tends to view
those things. But it seems like the big turning point
was when she took a continuing ed class at NYU
in the late sixties, like a writing class for like
tween writing and teen writing. And she told NPR a
(17:41):
few years ago that it was like such a monumental
thing for her to like to know that she was
going to leave every Monday, leave her family, go to
the bus to New York City, and like her husband
was going to feed the kids, and she wasn't going
to be home until later that night. And just knowing
she had that creative outlet really freed her up men,
I think, yeah, and led to that children's book, and
(18:03):
then eventually led to the publishing of her first novel,
Iggy's House.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Yeah, it was a children's book, I guess maybe young
adult book about It's from the viewpoint of a little
white girl named Winnie who lives in a neighborhood where
her best friend has just moved and a black family
moves into the neighborhood, and it's all about the racial
tensions that developed White Flight. But it's rather than Judy
(18:32):
Bloom trying to make it from the viewpoint of the
little girl from the black family that just moved in.
I think she very wisely did it from the viewpoint
of this, you know, little white girl who's looking at
it from the outside and was kind of innocently trying
to figure out what the problem was, what was going on.
And this is nineteen seventy when it was published, and
(18:55):
this is not the kind of book that children were
finding in the library at the time by any means.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Yeah, for sure. So that's her first one published in
nineteen seventy, as far as the novel goes, and then
right out of the gate, her follow up book, again
also in nineteen seventy, was are you there, God, It's
me and Margaret Wow. So, I mean, can you just
imagine starting your career out with a stone cold classic
like that. It was eventually made into a movie that
(19:25):
was actually pretty good. I know, she Yeah, it wasn't bad.
You know, it's hard when you have such a beloved
book from your childhood, and I think that's why she
waited so long. You know, overtures for years and years
and years to like decades to try and get it
made into a film, and she always said no. And
I think she finally found you know, that it was
time and it turned out pretty good. I'm waiting, you know,
(19:46):
Ruby saw it, and I'm waiting for her to want
to read these books. Yeah, we got them all, like,
you know, ready at the gate, waiting for it.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
I in the bookshelf.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Yeah, yeah, they're ready.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
I didn't see it. I saw. I had a seven
point three on IMDb, which is definitely respectable, in ninety
nine percent on Rotten Tomatoes. So you're not the only
one who thought it was pretty good. So this book
that comes out, let's talk about Are you there, God,
it's me Margaret for a second. Okay. The reason we
referred to Judy Bloom as the Trailblazer is because she
(20:17):
was she was one of the first people writing this
kind of book for this age group as the hitting her.
Her book, The Outsiders takes place among high schoolers, same
with like The Chocolate War by Yeah Yeah, Robert love Them, Yeah,
(20:40):
Robert Ludlan's Chocolate War. And then also there's another one
called The cat ate My Gym Suit by Paula Danzinger.
That was fairly all of them had to do with
ninth graders or up right. Yeah, she's writing about like
eleven year olds. It's going through the beginnings of what
high school are now dealing with, right, And the only
(21:02):
person who beat her was as he hitting. From what
I could tell, I think The Outsiders came out in
nineteen sixty seven. Are you the Gut? Are you there? Gut?
It's me Margaret came out in nineteen seventy, and again
it was just totally different from other books for kids
at the time.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Yeah, I mean, you know, in kids books are still
like this in a lot of ways, although there's a
lot more variety now, thankfully, But back then it was
kind of like, you present a big problem, maybe there's
a moral issue or something, and there's some big grand
solution that teaches a big grand lesson. And she was like,
you know what, it's not that easy and it's not
(21:37):
that clean to grow up and black and white, So like,
I'm going to write books about how messy it is
and how maybe it's just a struggle sometimes, and you know,
there's just a lot of realism in her books of
like what it was really like to be an adolescent.
And you know, critics liked them right away, the buying
(22:00):
public love them. I think it was an are you there? God?
Was a New York Times bestseller in a New York
Times Book Review Outstanding Book of nineteen seventy and just
kind of launched her right out of the gate, you know,
for sure?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Yeah, I saw. It also really took off when it
came out in a trade paperback version in nineteen seventy
two at a price that, like younger kids, her audience
could afford. Oh yeah, they didn't have to ask their
parents to buy it for them anymore. Right, So, one
of the things that Judy Bloom is credited with is
(22:35):
essentially approaching adolescents, approaching well, not just menstruation, chuk but monarchy.
Remember that. Yeah, monarchy used to be like a guest character,
a recurring guest character on early stuff you should know,
weirdly enough.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Yeah, it's just a good trivia word.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
For sure. But she approached it as like it's a
good thing. This is exciting, Like her characters are like,
hurry up, I want to hurry up. And one passage
that's very, very famous is when Margaret and her friends,
who all collectively make up the Preteen Sensations. It's their
little secret club where they get together and talk about
(23:13):
this stuff. One of them has the idea they want
to basically grow breasts, I guess is the best way
to put it. And so one of them suggests they
like move their elbows like back and forth alongside of
their like they're basically pumping. And while you do that,
you have to say, I must, I must, I must
increase my bust.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Classic.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
I didn't know that came from that. I always associate
that with the Lords of Acid. Remember that song.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Oh yeah, I had.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
No idea that Jade for You from Lords of Acid
was a Judy Bloom fan and was sighting are you there?
Got It's me?
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Margaret pretty cool and s he Hinton was a teenage
girl when she wrote The Outsider.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
I'm just finding out all sorts of big stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, monumental book right out
of the gate. She is. At the same time this
is going on, you know, a kind of playing this
housewife role, but again realizing, like you know, I don't
know if that was the life for me. I got
married when I was young. I never had sort of
the freedom and adventure that I longed for in her life.
(24:19):
And she said, you know, there was a quote where
she said, for sixteen years writing save me and my marriage,
but by the mid seventies the rules it changed. So
by nineteen seventy five she's like, you know, I think
I want a divorce, and she did that. She divorced
her first husband, moved to New York, and then a
year later married a physicist named Thomas Kitchens. They were
(24:41):
only married for about four years, but they had a
pretty adventurous life. They lived in London and in New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Right, I think at Los Alamosh Okay. So also by
nineteen seventy five, when she decided to get divorced from
her first husband, the lawyer, she had put out ten
books between nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Pretty amazing.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Yeah, basically almost all the ones that you and I
read came out in that first like ten year spurt.
Like she just wrote classic best selling kids books just
right out of the gate. It's just really cool how
much she was able to do, how much she was
able to just connect with little kids. I still don't
get it, like I do not understand how an adult
(25:27):
can do that. I'm just in awe of it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, for sure. I know her nineteen seventy five book
Forever is not one that I read. But that's a
very big book for Emily, and I know, a very
big book for a lot of like probably girls of
all generations, but gen X's Girls in particular, because that
was the one where she had kind of been building
up to, you know, you know, talking about prepubescent stuff
(25:53):
and adolescents and puberty and then finally and Forever, it's
like finally a character that wants to try and have
sex for the first time, and Emily is just like, oh, man,
like to read that book as a kid, it was
like a really big deal.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yes, And the book itself, I've seen it described as
essentially a self help manual for having safe sex because
she follows the main character Catherine throughout like this process
where she meets the dude, she falls in love, she
decides to have sex, and then before she has sex,
she goes to like planned parenthood to get condoms. Yeah,
(26:27):
Like she basically learns anatomy and reproductive stuff, like all
sorts of different things that are laid out like this
is what's happening to Catherine. But reader, I'm really talking
to you, and I'm making it as plain as possible.
If you're gonna have sex, do this stuff, because this
is how you have safe sex. And of course, as
(26:48):
we'll see, like that just made it an absolute target
for book challenges, where you formally request a book be
being under removed from a library.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah, I mean, we can go into talk about that
if you want. I mean, as much as people love
Judy Bloom, there was another set of people that hated
an author, a grown woman writing about the realistic challenges
of like being a kid and being a tween or
a teen and going through puberty and all that stuff.
So she was a target right out of the gate
(27:20):
for book banning, like you said, and is on a
lot of lists. As you know, some of the most
banned books of all time have been Judy Bloom books,
which is like a to me, a feather in your
cap as an author, because that means you're probably telling
the truth about something.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Yeah, but as we'll see, that drove her crazy, like
she is not one for censorship, you know.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
So the key I saw to understanding why everybody wants
to ban Judy Bloom books. Is that Judy Bloom was
the epitome of second wave feminism. Like all the stuff
that Betty Fridhan talked about, the feminine mystique is embodied
in the writing of Judy Bloom, and Judy Bloom is
talking directly to the next generation of kids, essentially saying
(28:03):
this is the way to be, this is a good
this is a good way to become a good person
and love yourself and treat other people kindly. And the
arch rival to second wave feminism in the seventies and eighties,
and I just think still today is conservativism. They don't
want kids shaped like that. So when they see people,
(28:27):
when they see books like that should He Bloom books
in their library, they don't want their kids anywhere near it,
so they request the book be removed. That's why those
those books get challenged all the time, is because they're
a challenge themselves to conservative ideology, which largely revolves around
the idea that if you don't teach kids stuff, they're
(28:48):
not going to do it. They're not going to think
of it themselves, and they're not going to do it.
And yeah, it seems preposterous to me too, and it
gets proven wrong time and time and time again. But
that's just how that's just the conservative outlook. That's just
they don't feel comfortable trying a different way in that respect.
And you know, I mean that's a lot of people's viewpoint,
(29:09):
it's not necessarily mine. But I think, you know, it
doesn't mean that's inherently wrong. I just I just don't
like the idea of banning books, even though I get
to an extent where they're coming from. They're trying to
protect their children, not take off Judy Bloom or the liberals.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah, and I think a lot of what that frame
of mind comes from is I want to be the
decider of my kid learning what they learn when they
learn it. As far as sexuality goes, right, I want
to be in charge of that. I don't want it
to come from some book from some lady that they
happen to check out at the library.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Because they had a good like cover illustration.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Yeah, and you know, I get that to a certain degree.
But like ts, you know, for Judy, as far as
she goes, she didn't think she was being very controversial.
She thought I'm just writing in a very frank way
about how kids really are, Like I was writing the truth, right, Chuck,
All right, Well, one day, say she didn't like the
sterilized adolescents that she saw portrayed in like other kids
(30:07):
books and you know, books that ignored the angst of
what was going on in kids' lives. So she thought,
and I think she was very much correct in my opinion,
and I'm sure yours that she was doing a service
by like kind of portraying the realism of childhood and teendom. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Better to learn this stuff from an adult who knows
what they're talking about, who's been through this and knows
how to describe the process of having safe sex than
from Tina who has an older brother that mentioned to
her like, you know one time.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
So, yes, she has been I think she's not just
been one of the most banned authors of the eighties
and the nineties, but also the twenty first century. I
think even in twenty twenty five, twenty twenty four to
twenty twenty five school year, she was her novel Forever
was on the list of most banned books. The one
(31:02):
that had it was basically a safe sex self help Yeah,
so yeah, you can kind of understand that. But it's
not just that. There's been other ones too, Like Tiger
Eyes is about a girl whose father is killed during
a robbery of the seven to eleven that he works at,
and her coming to terms with that and suffering from
(31:24):
grief and depression, and one of her friends is an
underage binge drinker. I mean, that book gets banned a
lot too.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Yeah. Man, I just think it's so cool that she
was brave enough to like write these stories, you know.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Yeah, for sure. I mean like she was very brave,
especially after it became clear and I think it did
fairly early on that there was a large segment of
America that viewed her books as controversial, And so yeah,
every time she sat down and wrote one of these,
it was a greater and greater act of bravery.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Yeah, and a bigger and bigger middle finger. Should we
take our second break?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (32:04):
All right, we'll be right back, everybody with more on
Judy Bloom. All right. So I did mention, and you know,
(32:27):
this isn't the most revealing thing in the world. A
lot of authors write about what they know, but Judy
Bloom definitely did that. When she was living in Maine,
she wrote a story said in Maine. When she lived
in New Mexico, she wrote, I think I said movie.
She wrote a book. You know, I'm talking about books here.
She wrote a book. Did I say movie?
Speaker 2 (32:45):
I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Okay, I thought it said movie.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
If you did, I'm sorry I missed Anyway.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
A lot of times she wrote books like set where
she was living, or about sort of veiled, thinly veiled
sort of things that happened in her own childhood. Super unusual.
But she also did the same thing. You know, she
wrote adult books too. We're talking about her kid's books.
She wrote four novels for adults. They were all bestsellers
as well, and they were all sort of about her
(33:11):
life experiences, starting with Wifey in nineteen seventy eight, about
a woman who was in a sort of traditional marriage
he wanted to break out of that.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Yeah, pretty autobiographical. There's also Smart Women, which was about
women navigating dating and relationships after like post divorce.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
That was eighty three. There's also one that came out
in ninety eight called Summer Sisters. It's about a female friendship.
That sounds pretty sweet.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah, Summer's in the season.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
And then in the Unlikely Event from twenty fifteen. That
was the one you mentioned that she wrote about a
family going through those actual plane crashes that she went through.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, for sure. And you know I said that critics,
they certainly didn't love everything. I know, are you there,
Goud It's me Margaret. And a lot of her best
sellers got some good marks with critics, but a lot
of critics kind of dunked on her for being a
simplistic writer. And there was one critic who compared her
writing to a shopping list. And I always just thought
(34:10):
her work was just very readable for her audience. If
that's simplistic, then I guess it works in my opinion,
you know, yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
I mean we're talking about eleven year old readers who
may have only been reading for the last handful of years, you.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Know, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Yeah. But the difference is she didn't write down to them, right,
So yeah, I think I think there were just people
who didn't like what she was writing, and we're taking
potshots wherever they felt they could get.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
This made me kind of want to reread one of
her books and just see how it grabbed me as
an adult.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
You know, Yeah, I ran across a couple of people
who were talking about some of these books and they're like, yeah,
I spent three hours reading this and it was.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Well worth right, and it just plays through it.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah. I feel the same way that I'd like to
read some more, just at least one or two and
then the entire catalog of Sweet Valley High.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Emily read those two man, she reads a lot and
read a lot as a kid.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yeah, well they were huge when we were younger.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah. And the other one for Emily was the Nancy
Drew books. She still has her collection from like her mom,
from when she was a kid, and she read all
of those.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
That's really cool.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah, my sisters read those. And The Hardy Boys a
little bit.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
I was a fan of Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Two. Why does it sound so familiar?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
It was like Alfred Hitchcock's nephew and every once in
a while they could call on Alfred Hitchcock.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, but they read some of.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Them, investigate some It was very Hardy Boys esque.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, I like them for some reason.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
What a time, What.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
A time to be alive.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
So because of all of the book banning and stuff
that went on, it's probably no surprise that she became
very much a a kind of central person in the
anti book banning movement. Yeah, she has worked a lot
over the years with the National Coalition Against Censorship. She
had a couple of projects in the eighties trying to
(36:15):
get like parents and kids talking more, and one was
called the Kids Fun Capitol Kids in nineteen eighty one. Yeah,
very cool, And that's to develop programs that encourage communication
between parents and teens, the foster parent child discussions through books.
And then she had a book she I don't think
we mentioned. One of the things that she got a
lot through her career was letters from kids who often
(36:37):
told her things that like they would never tell their
parents and were just very open and expressive. So she
hopefully had permission, but she eventually put those out in
a book called Letters to Judy Colon What your kids
wish they could tell you, And this was in nineteen
eighty six.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Yeah, I thought that was a pretty cool thing to do.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Same, So yeah, I'd like she's the real deal. She's
not just in it for the dough, although I'm quite
sure she's made quite a bit of dough, because I
think she's sold like ninety million copies of her books
over the years. Ooh, man, forty different languages.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Yeah, so she has made quite a bit of money,
but she's also legit in the fact that she's she
really genuinely wants to figure out how to bridge the
gap between parents and their kids to help both groups.
She also you said that she was like really against censorship.
(37:37):
One of the things that she took a stand against
was back in twenty twenty three was a cancel culture.
Basically any kind of intellectual censorship or anything that was
against any intellectual freedom. She was against. And she was
talking about this in an interview with The Times of
London in April of that year. Apparently they asked her
(38:01):
about JK Rowling, who, at the time and I think
still basically every day was controversial because she made some
like repeated double down comments about that we're just transphobic essentially. Yeah,
and out of that context, in a different context, they
(38:21):
I asked Judy Bloom about that about JK Rowling, and
she said that I love her. I am behind her
one hundred percent. As I watched from afar and the
way that it was printed in the Times of London article,
it made it sound like she was like, yeah, I'm
backing up this person's transphobic comments. I'm behind her one
(38:42):
hundred percent. So she had to take the social media
to be like that was out of context.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
Yeah, in fact, I think we should read her quote
even she said I wholly support the trans community. My point,
which was taken out of context, is that I can
empathize with the writer or any person who has been
harassed online, stand with the trans community, and vehemently disagree
with anyone who does not fully support equality and acceptance
of LGTBQ plus people. Anything to the contrary is total
(39:11):
b sh And I love that she took such a
hard stance of like, hey, hey, hey, don't misunderstand my words,
like I'm Judy effing Bloom exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
That was pretty much what's between the lines there for sure. Yeah,
so let's see, you said that she lives in Key West.
Now you can go to books and books at the
studios of Key West and say hi, maybe buy something,
and then she's I mean, she's just basically been really
back in the spotlight in the last few years, even
though she's from what I understand, still on hiatus since
(39:45):
twenty fifteen from writing or at least publishing. But starting
in twenty twenty three, there were not just that movie
for Are You There Got It to Me? Margaret, which,
like you said, people have been waiting decades for. There's
a documentary that came out that year, Bloom Forever.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
It's great and yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
And then in twenty twenty four there was a biography,
The Genius of Judy, by rachelle Bergstein, that was kind
of like a scholarly exploration of how Bloom's work impacted kids.
And then there was another one. It was a authorized
and then unauthorized autobiography called Judy Bloom Colon a Life
(40:25):
that her friend Mark Oppenheimer published in March twenty twenty six,
and that she publicly removed her support from cut off
contact with Oppenheimer. Yea, and then didn't explain to the
public or Oppenheimer why.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Yeah. I don't know why.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
No, no one knows why she didn't tell me. Poured
over those books and have been like or that book
and have been like, maybe this is it? Is this it?
I don't know. Mark Oppenheimer's like, I have no idea.
She didn't explain it to me. There wasn't anything controversial
she like, but she read the first draft and that
was it.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Yeah, yeah, who knows, you know, I know what you mentioned.
She had those two divorces, but you'll be glad to
know that she found long lasting true love. Sometimes it
takes a couple of times to get it right. But
she met a guy named George Cooper in nineteen seventy
nine and they moved in together after their very first
date and got married eight years later in nineteen eighty seven.
(41:20):
And that is who helps her run that bookstore down
in Key Wes. So they're still together after all these years.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
That is super cute. Yeah, he's like a civil rights
law professor.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
I think, yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
What else you got?
Speaker 1 (41:36):
I got nothing else I don't either.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Hats off to Judy Bloom. Even if you don't agree
with her writing and what she writes about to kids,
you still got to admire bravery, courage.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
And if you want to know more about Judy Bloom,
doesn't really matter what aide you are, go read some
of her books. While you're doing that, And you know what,
you could do a lot worse than checking it out
at your local library to support its existence there true
and or could do both. Buy one from your local
independent bookseller.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Yeah, maybe from Judy Bloom herself, sure you're in Key West.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Or if you find a dude selling books out of
the trunk of his car that is as independent a
bookseller as you can find.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
I wonder if you bought one from Judy Bloom herself
in her own bookstore and you're like, oh my god,
will you please sign this, She's like, I don't sign
books on Judy writing Bloom.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Please leave.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Here's your receipt middle finger.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Let's see. Chuck just made himself laugh, which is wonderful.
That means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
That means he's awake. Bonjour, Josh and Chuck. My husband
and I finally had a chance to see you live
for the first time at Massey Hall in Toronto this June,
which in real time was just a couple of nights
ago for us, and it was the greatest show on Earth.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Yeah, we got a standing ovation.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yeah, it was really something. We are from a small
community about two hours and a half north of Toronto,
and we're definitely not city people, but we figured it's
worth it for Josh and Chuck. My husband's been a
huge fan and loyal listener for many years. I'll admit
that I had personally listen because it gave me something
to talk about with a guy who had eventually become
my husband. But it didn't take long before I genuinely
(43:16):
fell in love with the show myself, and because of that,
I've always associated both of you with the very beginning
of our relationship. Nice your show at Massey Hall far
exceeded our expectations. I just wanted to thank you for
giving us such a wonderful evening. Atmosphere was warm, relaxed,
genuinely fun. My husband was smiling from ear to ear
the entire time, and despite the anxiety that events like
this can sometimes bring, he was comfortable and able to
(43:39):
simply enjoy himself, and that alone meant more to me
than I can express. So thank you both for doing
what you do despite all the craziness in the world
right now. It brought me so much joy to see
a room full of people come together simply to laugh
and learn and enjoy a couple of hours together. I
think your Canadian listeners note just how kind and genuine
you both are, and we truly appreciate that you made
the trip to spend some time with us here in care.
(44:00):
We'd be lucky to have you back anytime, because you're
always welcome here. Thanks for such a memorable experience, warmly,
Kelsey and Andrew. Sweet.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Yeah, that is a world class email.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Huh maybe best ever.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
That's the kind of email that removes borders and just
turns us into one great, big North American continent. You know. Agreed, Well,
thanks a lot, Kelsey and Andrew. Thanks for coming to
see us, and thank you Kelsey for such a great email.
And if you want to try to top that, let's
see what you got. You can wrap it up, spank
it on the bottom, and send it off to stuff
(44:33):
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's just us. Jerry's on vacation actually as usual,
and this is stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
You should not. Have you read any Judy Bloom books.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yes, I've read a bunch of them. I was going
down the list checking off the ones I've read.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Oh, interesting, me too. I had a feeling you hadn't
for some.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Reason, because I'm soulless and robotic.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Meet Mark. Yeah, I bet you. We've read a lot
of the same one. So let's go over that.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I bet too. All right, now, okay, you ready, Yeah,
we'll say them all at the same time.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Now you say yours, and I'll say whether that's one
of mine?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
All right?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Freckle Juice did not read that one?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
I did? It was a good one. I'm going to
say that about all of them. Tales of a fourth
grade nothing.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
I did read that.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
I did two, but I didn't remember what that was about,
and I didn't go look it up. Okay, otherwise known
as Sheila the Great.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
I read that.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
That was a good one, blubbers the one aside from
are you there? God? It's me, Margaret that I remember
the most.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, I read both of those, and then I think
that was it for me, all right. I think I
read all the I read. Then again, maybe I won't, Okay,
And I also read Superfudge.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Oh I did too. I'm sorry I did too. I
read Superfudge.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Yeah, so I think I read six or seven of these.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
And I had a question mark next to then again,
maybe I won't. I may have read that one, or
I just may have been aware of it.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Yeah, And then the one what is it? Tiger Eyes?
Sounded familiar, but I'm not sure if I read those,
but I think it, like, you know. One reason I
wanted to ask because I think Judy Bloom and her
books get associated with young girls. Sure, and I was like,
was I an outlier because I read six or seven
Judy Bloom books and like loved them all? Or you know,
maybe both out liars.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I don't think so. I don't remember being particularly odd
or weird, at least in my elementary school, so the
fact that you did too, I would guess it was
probably fairly normal. I also read a lot of Ramona
Quimby books. Did you read any of those? Now?
Speaker 1 (02:15):
I never read those.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
I knew that the day I became at an adolescent,
I guess, uh huh, because that was halfway through a
Ramona Quimby book, You're Seven, and I realized I didn't
give a good damn what was about to come next
in Ramona Quimby's life. All of a.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Sudden, Oh no, that was it for me and Ramona.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
I always have fond memories of her. Those were great
fun books.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, well, I think it's cool that we both read
this stuff that our parents were. My suspicion is that
it was the same in my house, is that they
weren't paying attention enough, probably to say, hey, should you
be reading this book about, you know, a young girl
going through menstruation and discovering her sexual awakening?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Right exactly? My parents paid enough attention. I remember my
dad like some tense conversations I barely overheard. The only
word I could make out was fruity.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Oh man, goodness me.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
He was a real jerk. Grow now.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Yeah, well, here we are, though, well adjusted and kicking
button life.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, you know, it's great. Is I can't wait to
get the one or two emails really like that was
really mean of your dad to call.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
You fruity, right, yeah, get some support.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Right, he didn't. Really everybody, is what I'm trying to say. Okay,
I think you make a great point though, Chuck, Like
I think it's whether it's normal or not. I feel
like it was great that we read those books. They
were great books to start with, totally, but also like,
it's just so rare for an adult to have that
level of insight into what it's like to be a
(03:47):
kid growing into well an adolescent again, right, that's just
people have memories of that. I have memories of it,
but the vibe, the feeling and being able to convey
it again, that is long gone.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, I totally agree.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
So she was good at what she did and she
was a trailblazing pioneer of the first kind.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Yeah, totally. And when you say was Judy Bloom amazingly
is still with us in her late eighties, living down
in Key West, but I think she's basically given up writing.
She hasn't put out a book in a while. She
does run a bookstore down in Key West, which I
would love to go to sometime.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
I wish I had known the one time I went
to Key West, because I definitely would have popped in
to see her.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, so today we salute Judy Bloom. And I guess
let's go back to her childhood. Sure, because she was
born Judith Marcia Sussman on February second, nineteen thirty eight
in Elizabeth, New Jersey, just outside of New York, and
grew up in a pretty just normal, middle class Jewish family.
Her dad was a dentist, her mom was a homemaker,
(04:57):
and she you know, seemed to have a I was
about to say, a happy life. But she was a
fraught kid about some stuff. But not because she had
like some awful life. It was a pretty normal life,
but a lot of angst.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
It seems like, yeah, I'm fairly well earned. I feel like, yeah,
for sure, but not because her family dynamic was screwed up.
It was like her father was her confidant. Yeah, her
entire childhood sounds like a really good father. I didn't
get the impression that her mom was anything terrible, but
(05:31):
I think her father played a more prominent role.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah, I think such a But what her.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Mom gave her was the gift of loving to read,
which is man, there are a few gifts you can
give a kid better than.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
That, you know, yeah, no kidding. And I know you
and I have talked about this privately, but you know,
when Ruby was diagnosed with dyslexia, we were both as
avid readers, just you know, sort of afraid that meant
she wouldn't have that joy. And she's gotten over it
to the point where she's an avid reader and it
just makes it so happy. And you always wonder what
your kid's going to be like. And when I was
(06:03):
reading about young Judy Bloom making up stories like life
stories and backstories for her dolls and playthings and creating
characters and scenarios, like Ruby does a lot of that stuff,
and I'm always wondering if, like you know, she'd writes
stories and stuff like is that her path? And like
who knows, But you know, just like Judy Bloom, they
(06:24):
both had these active or have these active kind of
make believe lives, which I think is super cool and
healthy and awesome.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah. The thing that stuck out to me was that
she would take piano lessons and then whilst she was
practicing the piano herself, she in her head she was
teaching imaginary students like characters. I love that she was
giving them piano lessons yeah, and you know that's pretty
cool in and of itself. She actually kept a journal
a notebook to chart their progress the imaginary student. She
(06:56):
was teaching progress in her notebook, like that's how we're
find her imagination was as far as character development goes
as a kid.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah, that's super cool. And that reminded me and again
not to just keep bringing Ruby into it. But I
know you're a fan, so you don't mind. Yeah. But
when I took her to her first Hawks game when
she was like eight or nine, maybe she sat there
and I don't think I've told this before, but she
I looked and she brought her a little notebook like
she always does, just in case she gets bored, and
(07:26):
she was keeping notes. And finally was like, what are
you noting? And she had noted all the players and
all of their shoes and what brand and what color
shoes they had, and what number they were and everything.
And I just thought, what an interesting thing to do that.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, I mean I was never into that kind of
thing now, so I yeah, I feel like I'm definitely
looking at it from the outside in.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yeah. I just you know, when you're a parent, you're
always like, what does that mean? And like maybe one
day I'll look back and go like, oh it all
makes sense now or whatever. Sure, maybe she'll be an
inventory or something. Yeah, what's it called when you manage.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Logistics?
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, logistics.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
She'll be in charge of logistics of moving basketball players
around the country. Great, Yeah that's cool. That's a great story.
And yeah, I can't quite get it either. I mean,
is it like a calming thing?
Speaker 1 (08:21):
I don't know, I have no idea.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Well, let me know when you figure it out.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Like twenty years probably.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
So even though Judy Bloom was like she came up
with characters and had a very rich internal life as
a kid, she apparently never particularly aspired to be a writer.
She ended up wanting to find essentially like a creative
outlet later on, as we'll see. But as a kid
(08:49):
that wasn't she wouldn't like, that's what I'm going to
be as a writer. And so that comes later in
between then and now. But the opposite, so now would
be while she was a child, then would be as
she's grown up a little more. Oh man, you said
that she had a kind of a fraught childhood, and
(09:10):
as a result of that, she definitely suffered from anxiety
as a kid. And this is like nineteen fifties anxiety,
so like the real deal kind where you saw like
a psychoanalyst sometimes.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, certainly starting out in the forties when you're a
little kid, especially a Jewish American kid, and World War
II is going around, there was a big preoccupation in
her family and you know, every probably Jewish American kid's
life about what was going on overseas, afraid that could
happen to them and their family, that kind of thing.
And then really, this is so sad. She was always
(09:41):
just worried about her father dying because a couple of
her uncles died when they were younger, in their early
forties of heart attacks I guess heart failure. Yeah, and
she was just always worried about her dad, and you
know doing kid stuff like you know, making a deal
with God, like hey, if I ace this test, it'll
help my dad live. And just it's just so sort
(10:03):
of heartbreaking to hear that stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, and if that sounds a little familiar, then you
probably have read are you there, God, it's me Margaret. Yeah.
So yeah, that was a big deal. Like that kind
of guided her outlook, and that's a lot to worry
about as a little kid, right, totally. H So another
thing that happened. Remember I said her dad was like
one of her biggest, most prominent figures in her entire
(10:26):
life as a kid. There were two years where she
and her mom and brother moved to Miami Beach because
her brother had suffered some sort of chronic illness I believe,
and they were like, go to Miami apparently the one
hundred and ten percent humidity will be good.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
And her father stayed back in Elizabeth, New Jersey because
he was a dentist, so he had to stay dentisting. Yeah,
and that separation apparently was so significant that she developed
an obsessive compulsive disorder. Only would she, like you said,
kind of make deals with God. She would, you know,
(11:05):
maybe turn a door knob handle X number of times,
and as long as she remembered to do that, her
father would stay alive. Like that kind of stuff. Again,
we're talking about a kid who's less than ten years old.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah, that's a lot to take on. It just made
me real sad to hear that. But she also had
a few and you know, as we'll see, she wrote
a lot about stuff that she knew either places where
she lived, or about things that were you know, like
you said, and are you there, God it to me
Margaret kind of writing about that. She also wrote later
in life about a family who experienced these three plane
(11:39):
crashes sort of near their house that affected their household,
and that really happened to her, right.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, you know, over the course of fifty eight days,
less than two months, there were three separate plane crashes
from the Newark Airport, which apparently was like right there
that the runways were pointed essentially at Elizabeth. Yeah, and
a hundred people died from those three crashes, eleven of
(12:06):
which were like neighbors, friends and neighbors, like townfolk from
Elizabeth who had been on the ground in the wrong
place at the wrong time.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yeah. So that's obviously gonna you know, color young kids, psyche,
you know for sure.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
I mean, what are the odds of something like that happening.
I guess it was bad enough that they closed the
Newark Airport for a year and rebuilt the runway so
that they weren't pointed at Elizabeth anymore.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, that's that's terrible.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, So all those things together certainly like shaped her childhood,
her pre adolescence.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah, and then she like kind of grew up, like
her life was pretty normal nineteen fifties early nineteen sixties
type life, although she was a little more on the
alternative side. It looks like it sounds like she was
a bit of a beatnik.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah. I think she gravitated towards that, like when she graduated,
and she graduated, you know, high school, at the top
of her class, and then went to NYU, and then
there in the fifties at NYU, it sounds like she
was definitely kind of slanted toward that bohemian culture and
drawn to the beatnik types.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yes, she was hanging with Llewell and Davis.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Should we take a break, Yeah, all right, we'll take
an earlier break. It seems like a good college seems
like a good breaking point to me. Oh, I agree,
all right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
So we're back, Chuck and Judy Bloom is stuck in
college because we took an ad break, and we're going
to dislodge her. She's a junior. It's nineteen fifty nine.
She meets a guy named John Bloom. She was twenty
one at the time. He would have been twenty seven. Yeah,
he was already like well out of school, established himself
(14:02):
as a lawyer, and he said, hey, tootz, how about
we get married. And she liked that idea, so they
got engaged and they got married that year. Sadly, very
very sadly. I'm sure this hit her quite hard. Her
father wasn't there to walk her down the aisle because
like a month before the wedding he died from a
heart attack. He wasn't early forties, but he was early
(14:25):
mid fifties, which is still very very young.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah, I mean to see your fear realize like that,
like the one thing that she was worried about, specifically
the heart attack too, must have been devastating. So she
gets married. In nineteen sixty one, she grad graduated from
NYU with a degree in early childhood education, and the
plan was to sort of you know, you know, you
(14:48):
mentioned earlier she didn't want to be a writer necessarily,
and you know, one of the big reasons, because it
is in the nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties when
she was a kid, that just wasn't an avenue that
was as open to young women. It's a big reason
that se Hinton kept the initials se Hinton when she
wrote The Outsiders and all those books.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
You know, I didn't know se Hinton was a woman.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Are you serious?
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah, that's serious.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Yeah. I thought c Hinton was a teenage girl when
she wrote The Outsiders.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I had no idea. Wow, yeah, yeah, I thought that
was Steve and Edie Hinton.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
That's why she did it. I mean it worked. I
guess she's like, I got to be able to fool
Josh Clark.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
No, but I mean like, I had no idea. This
is literally the first time I'm hearing that. It's not
even like, oh that vaguely rings a bell. I have
never heard that in my entire life.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Well, there you have it. She was a teenage girl
in high school when she wrote The Outsiders.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
That's really cool.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
But again, that's why she kept the name se Hinton
because just publishing wasn't so open to young women writing books.
So that's why Judy Bloom didn't. And when she was
graduating college, she was just sort of on that track.
She was like, I'm going to get my degree, I'm
going to get married, which I already did before I graduated.
I'm gonna have kids and be a homemaker, and within
(16:05):
a couple of years of graduating, she had a daughter
named Randy Lee and then a son named Lawrence Andrew
and was you know, very happily it seems, back in
the New Jersey suburbs. Yep, while her husband was attorneying.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Yes, so I had said though that she was. She
started writing because she was like, I need to do
something else besides just like raise kids and sit at
home and dust. That just was not enough to fulfill
her as a person. So once both of her kids
were in preschool, she was like, I'll write some books
(16:38):
for my kids, or at least my kids friends if
the kids don't like it, she started creating picture books.
Essentially the first one she came up was, or at
least the first one. Her first published book was a
children's picture book called The One in the Middle is
the Green Kangaroo, which is a great, great children's book name.
But that didn't come like easy. That wasn't like a
(17:01):
you know, first try. And she she got her big break.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Yeah, I mean it's I think she went a couple
of years, like two two and a half years, getting
you know, rejection letter after rejection letter. I think they
dug who helped us with this one.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Julia.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, Julia found that she was getting like six no
letters per week before she became like an overnight success.
You know, that's how the media like tends to view
those things. But it seems like the big turning point
was when she took a continuing ed class at NYU
in the late sixties, like a writing class for like
tween writing and teen writing. And she told NPR a
(17:41):
few years ago that it was like such a monumental
thing for her to like to know that she was
going to leave every Monday, leave her family, go to
the bus to New York City, and like her husband
was going to feed the kids, and she wasn't going
to be home until later that night. And just knowing
she had that creative outlet really freed her up men,
I think, yeah, and led to that children's book, and
(18:03):
then eventually led to the publishing of her first novel,
Iggy's House.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Yeah, it was a children's book, I guess maybe young
adult book about It's from the viewpoint of a little
white girl named Winnie who lives in a neighborhood where
her best friend has just moved and a black family
moves into the neighborhood, and it's all about the racial
tensions that developed White Flight. But it's rather than Judy
(18:32):
Bloom trying to make it from the viewpoint of the
little girl from the black family that just moved in.
I think she very wisely did it from the viewpoint
of this, you know, little white girl who's looking at
it from the outside and was kind of innocently trying
to figure out what the problem was, what was going on.
And this is nineteen seventy when it was published, and
(18:55):
this is not the kind of book that children were
finding in the library at the time by any means.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Yeah, for sure. So that's her first one published in
nineteen seventy, as far as the novel goes, and then
right out of the gate, her follow up book, again
also in nineteen seventy, was are you there, God, It's
me and Margaret Wow. So, I mean, can you just
imagine starting your career out with a stone cold classic
like that. It was eventually made into a movie that
(19:25):
was actually pretty good. I know, she Yeah, it wasn't bad.
You know, it's hard when you have such a beloved
book from your childhood, and I think that's why she
waited so long. You know, overtures for years and years
and years to like decades to try and get it
made into a film, and she always said no. And
I think she finally found you know, that it was
time and it turned out pretty good. I'm waiting, you know,
(19:46):
Ruby saw it, and I'm waiting for her to want
to read these books. Yeah, we got them all, like,
you know, ready at the gate, waiting for it.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
I in the bookshelf.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Yeah, yeah, they're ready.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
I didn't see it. I saw. I had a seven
point three on IMDb, which is definitely respectable, in ninety
nine percent on Rotten Tomatoes. So you're not the only
one who thought it was pretty good. So this book
that comes out, let's talk about Are you there, God,
it's me Margaret for a second. Okay. The reason we
referred to Judy Bloom as the Trailblazer is because she
(20:17):
was she was one of the first people writing this
kind of book for this age group as the hitting her.
Her book, The Outsiders takes place among high schoolers, same
with like The Chocolate War by Yeah Yeah, Robert love Them, Yeah,
(20:40):
Robert Ludlan's Chocolate War. And then also there's another one
called The cat ate My Gym Suit by Paula Danzinger.
That was fairly all of them had to do with
ninth graders or up right. Yeah, she's writing about like
eleven year olds. It's going through the beginnings of what
high school are now dealing with, right, And the only
(21:02):
person who beat her was as he hitting. From what
I could tell, I think The Outsiders came out in
nineteen sixty seven. Are you the Gut? Are you there? Gut?
It's me Margaret came out in nineteen seventy, and again
it was just totally different from other books for kids
at the time.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Yeah, I mean, you know, in kids books are still
like this in a lot of ways, although there's a
lot more variety now, thankfully, But back then it was
kind of like, you present a big problem, maybe there's
a moral issue or something, and there's some big grand
solution that teaches a big grand lesson. And she was like,
you know what, it's not that easy and it's not
(21:37):
that clean to grow up and black and white, So like,
I'm going to write books about how messy it is
and how maybe it's just a struggle sometimes, and you know,
there's just a lot of realism in her books of
like what it was really like to be an adolescent.
And you know, critics liked them right away, the buying
(22:00):
public love them. I think it was an are you there? God?
Was a New York Times bestseller in a New York
Times Book Review Outstanding Book of nineteen seventy and just
kind of launched her right out of the gate, you know,
for sure?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Yeah, I saw. It also really took off when it
came out in a trade paperback version in nineteen seventy
two at a price that, like younger kids, her audience
could afford. Oh yeah, they didn't have to ask their
parents to buy it for them anymore. Right, So, one
of the things that Judy Bloom is credited with is
(22:35):
essentially approaching adolescents, approaching well, not just menstruation, chuk but monarchy.
Remember that. Yeah, monarchy used to be like a guest character,
a recurring guest character on early stuff you should know,
weirdly enough.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Yeah, it's just a good trivia word.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
For sure. But she approached it as like it's a
good thing. This is exciting, Like her characters are like,
hurry up, I want to hurry up. And one passage
that's very, very famous is when Margaret and her friends,
who all collectively make up the Preteen Sensations. It's their
little secret club where they get together and talk about
(23:13):
this stuff. One of them has the idea they want
to basically grow breasts, I guess is the best way
to put it. And so one of them suggests they
like move their elbows like back and forth alongside of
their like they're basically pumping. And while you do that,
you have to say, I must, I must, I must
increase my bust.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Classic.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
I didn't know that came from that. I always associate
that with the Lords of Acid. Remember that song.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Oh yeah, I had.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
No idea that Jade for You from Lords of Acid
was a Judy Bloom fan and was sighting are you there?
Got It's me?
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Margaret pretty cool and s he Hinton was a teenage
girl when she wrote The Outsider.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
I'm just finding out all sorts of big stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, monumental book right out
of the gate. She is. At the same time this
is going on, you know, a kind of playing this
housewife role, but again realizing, like you know, I don't
know if that was the life for me. I got
married when I was young. I never had sort of
the freedom and adventure that I longed for in her life.
(24:19):
And she said, you know, there was a quote where
she said, for sixteen years writing save me and my marriage,
but by the mid seventies the rules it changed. So
by nineteen seventy five she's like, you know, I think
I want a divorce, and she did that. She divorced
her first husband, moved to New York, and then a
year later married a physicist named Thomas Kitchens. They were
(24:41):
only married for about four years, but they had a
pretty adventurous life. They lived in London and in New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Right, I think at Los Alamosh Okay. So also by
nineteen seventy five, when she decided to get divorced from
her first husband, the lawyer, she had put out ten
books between nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Pretty amazing.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Yeah, basically almost all the ones that you and I
read came out in that first like ten year spurt.
Like she just wrote classic best selling kids books just
right out of the gate. It's just really cool how
much she was able to do, how much she was
able to just connect with little kids. I still don't
get it, like I do not understand how an adult
(25:27):
can do that. I'm just in awe of it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, for sure. I know her nineteen seventy five book
Forever is not one that I read. But that's a
very big book for Emily, and I know, a very
big book for a lot of like probably girls of
all generations, but gen X's Girls in particular, because that
was the one where she had kind of been building
up to, you know, you know, talking about prepubescent stuff
(25:53):
and adolescents and puberty and then finally and Forever, it's
like finally a character that wants to try and have
sex for the first time, and Emily is just like, oh, man,
like to read that book as a kid, it was
like a really big deal.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yes, And the book itself, I've seen it described as
essentially a self help manual for having safe sex because
she follows the main character Catherine throughout like this process
where she meets the dude, she falls in love, she
decides to have sex, and then before she has sex,
she goes to like planned parenthood to get condoms. Yeah,
(26:27):
Like she basically learns anatomy and reproductive stuff, like all
sorts of different things that are laid out like this
is what's happening to Catherine. But reader, I'm really talking
to you, and I'm making it as plain as possible.
If you're gonna have sex, do this stuff, because this
is how you have safe sex. And of course, as
(26:48):
we'll see, like that just made it an absolute target
for book challenges, where you formally request a book be
being under removed from a library.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah, I mean, we can go into talk about that
if you want. I mean, as much as people love
Judy Bloom, there was another set of people that hated
an author, a grown woman writing about the realistic challenges
of like being a kid and being a tween or
a teen and going through puberty and all that stuff.
So she was a target right out of the gate
(27:20):
for book banning, like you said, and is on a
lot of lists. As you know, some of the most
banned books of all time have been Judy Bloom books,
which is like a to me, a feather in your
cap as an author, because that means you're probably telling
the truth about something.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Yeah, but as we'll see, that drove her crazy, like
she is not one for censorship, you know.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
So the key I saw to understanding why everybody wants
to ban Judy Bloom books. Is that Judy Bloom was
the epitome of second wave feminism. Like all the stuff
that Betty Fridhan talked about, the feminine mystique is embodied
in the writing of Judy Bloom, and Judy Bloom is
talking directly to the next generation of kids, essentially saying
(28:03):
this is the way to be, this is a good
this is a good way to become a good person
and love yourself and treat other people kindly. And the
arch rival to second wave feminism in the seventies and eighties,
and I just think still today is conservativism. They don't
want kids shaped like that. So when they see people,
(28:27):
when they see books like that should He Bloom books
in their library, they don't want their kids anywhere near it,
so they request the book be removed. That's why those
those books get challenged all the time, is because they're
a challenge themselves to conservative ideology, which largely revolves around
the idea that if you don't teach kids stuff, they're
(28:48):
not going to do it. They're not going to think
of it themselves, and they're not going to do it.
And yeah, it seems preposterous to me too, and it
gets proven wrong time and time and time again. But
that's just how that's just the conservative outlook. That's just
they don't feel comfortable trying a different way in that respect.
And you know, I mean that's a lot of people's viewpoint,
(29:09):
it's not necessarily mine. But I think, you know, it
doesn't mean that's inherently wrong. I just I just don't
like the idea of banning books, even though I get
to an extent where they're coming from. They're trying to
protect their children, not take off Judy Bloom or the liberals.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah, and I think a lot of what that frame
of mind comes from is I want to be the
decider of my kid learning what they learn when they
learn it. As far as sexuality goes, right, I want
to be in charge of that. I don't want it
to come from some book from some lady that they
happen to check out at the library.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Because they had a good like cover illustration.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Yeah, and you know, I get that to a certain degree.
But like ts, you know, for Judy, as far as
she goes, she didn't think she was being very controversial.
She thought I'm just writing in a very frank way
about how kids really are, Like I was writing the truth, right, Chuck,
All right, Well, one day, say she didn't like the
sterilized adolescents that she saw portrayed in like other kids
(30:07):
books and you know, books that ignored the angst of
what was going on in kids' lives. So she thought,
and I think she was very much correct in my opinion,
and I'm sure yours that she was doing a service
by like kind of portraying the realism of childhood and teendom. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Better to learn this stuff from an adult who knows
what they're talking about, who's been through this and knows
how to describe the process of having safe sex than
from Tina who has an older brother that mentioned to
her like, you know one time.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
So, yes, she has been I think she's not just
been one of the most banned authors of the eighties
and the nineties, but also the twenty first century. I
think even in twenty twenty five, twenty twenty four to
twenty twenty five school year, she was her novel Forever
was on the list of most banned books. The one
(31:02):
that had it was basically a safe sex self help Yeah,
so yeah, you can kind of understand that. But it's
not just that. There's been other ones too, Like Tiger
Eyes is about a girl whose father is killed during
a robbery of the seven to eleven that he works at,
and her coming to terms with that and suffering from
(31:24):
grief and depression, and one of her friends is an
underage binge drinker. I mean, that book gets banned a
lot too.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Yeah. Man, I just think it's so cool that she
was brave enough to like write these stories, you know.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Yeah, for sure. I mean like she was very brave,
especially after it became clear and I think it did
fairly early on that there was a large segment of
America that viewed her books as controversial, And so yeah,
every time she sat down and wrote one of these,
it was a greater and greater act of bravery.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Yeah, and a bigger and bigger middle finger. Should we
take our second break?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (32:04):
All right, we'll be right back, everybody with more on
Judy Bloom. All right. So I did mention, and you know,
(32:27):
this isn't the most revealing thing in the world. A
lot of authors write about what they know, but Judy
Bloom definitely did that. When she was living in Maine,
she wrote a story said in Maine. When she lived
in New Mexico, she wrote, I think I said movie.
She wrote a book. You know, I'm talking about books here.
She wrote a book. Did I say movie?
Speaker 2 (32:45):
I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Okay, I thought it said movie.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
If you did, I'm sorry I missed Anyway.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
A lot of times she wrote books like set where
she was living, or about sort of veiled, thinly veiled
sort of things that happened in her own childhood. Super unusual.
But she also did the same thing. You know, she
wrote adult books too. We're talking about her kid's books.
She wrote four novels for adults. They were all bestsellers
as well, and they were all sort of about her
(33:11):
life experiences, starting with Wifey in nineteen seventy eight, about
a woman who was in a sort of traditional marriage
he wanted to break out of that.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Yeah, pretty autobiographical. There's also Smart Women, which was about
women navigating dating and relationships after like post divorce.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
That was eighty three. There's also one that came out
in ninety eight called Summer Sisters. It's about a female friendship.
That sounds pretty sweet.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah, Summer's in the season.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
And then in the Unlikely Event from twenty fifteen. That
was the one you mentioned that she wrote about a
family going through those actual plane crashes that she went through.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, for sure. And you know I said that critics,
they certainly didn't love everything. I know, are you there,
Goud It's me Margaret. And a lot of her best
sellers got some good marks with critics, but a lot
of critics kind of dunked on her for being a
simplistic writer. And there was one critic who compared her
writing to a shopping list. And I always just thought
(34:10):
her work was just very readable for her audience. If
that's simplistic, then I guess it works in my opinion,
you know, yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
I mean we're talking about eleven year old readers who
may have only been reading for the last handful of years, you.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Know, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Yeah. But the difference is she didn't write down to them, right,
So yeah, I think I think there were just people
who didn't like what she was writing, and we're taking
potshots wherever they felt they could get.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
This made me kind of want to reread one of
her books and just see how it grabbed me as
an adult.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
You know, Yeah, I ran across a couple of people
who were talking about some of these books and they're like, yeah,
I spent three hours reading this and it was.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Well worth right, and it just plays through it.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah. I feel the same way that I'd like to
read some more, just at least one or two and
then the entire catalog of Sweet Valley High.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Emily read those two man, she reads a lot and
read a lot as a kid.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yeah, well they were huge when we were younger.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah. And the other one for Emily was the Nancy
Drew books. She still has her collection from like her mom,
from when she was a kid, and she read all
of those.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
That's really cool.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah, my sisters read those. And The Hardy Boys a
little bit.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
I was a fan of Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Two. Why does it sound so familiar?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
It was like Alfred Hitchcock's nephew and every once in
a while they could call on Alfred Hitchcock.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, but they read some of.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Them, investigate some It was very Hardy Boys esque.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, I like them for some reason.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
What a time, What.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
A time to be alive.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
So because of all of the book banning and stuff
that went on, it's probably no surprise that she became
very much a a kind of central person in the
anti book banning movement. Yeah, she has worked a lot
over the years with the National Coalition Against Censorship. She
had a couple of projects in the eighties trying to
(36:15):
get like parents and kids talking more, and one was
called the Kids Fun Capitol Kids in nineteen eighty one. Yeah,
very cool, And that's to develop programs that encourage communication
between parents and teens, the foster parent child discussions through books.
And then she had a book she I don't think
we mentioned. One of the things that she got a
lot through her career was letters from kids who often
(36:37):
told her things that like they would never tell their
parents and were just very open and expressive. So she
hopefully had permission, but she eventually put those out in
a book called Letters to Judy Colon What your kids
wish they could tell you, And this was in nineteen
eighty six.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Yeah, I thought that was a pretty cool thing to do.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Same, So yeah, I'd like she's the real deal. She's
not just in it for the dough, although I'm quite
sure she's made quite a bit of dough, because I
think she's sold like ninety million copies of her books
over the years. Ooh, man, forty different languages.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Yeah, so she has made quite a bit of money,
but she's also legit in the fact that she's she
really genuinely wants to figure out how to bridge the
gap between parents and their kids to help both groups.
She also you said that she was like really against censorship.
(37:37):
One of the things that she took a stand against
was back in twenty twenty three was a cancel culture.
Basically any kind of intellectual censorship or anything that was
against any intellectual freedom. She was against. And she was
talking about this in an interview with The Times of
London in April of that year. Apparently they asked her
(38:01):
about JK Rowling, who, at the time and I think
still basically every day was controversial because she made some
like repeated double down comments about that we're just transphobic essentially. Yeah,
and out of that context, in a different context, they
(38:21):
I asked Judy Bloom about that about JK Rowling, and
she said that I love her. I am behind her
one hundred percent. As I watched from afar and the
way that it was printed in the Times of London article,
it made it sound like she was like, yeah, I'm
backing up this person's transphobic comments. I'm behind her one
(38:42):
hundred percent. So she had to take the social media
to be like that was out of context.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
Yeah, in fact, I think we should read her quote
even she said I wholly support the trans community. My point,
which was taken out of context, is that I can
empathize with the writer or any person who has been
harassed online, stand with the trans community, and vehemently disagree
with anyone who does not fully support equality and acceptance
of LGTBQ plus people. Anything to the contrary is total
(39:11):
b sh And I love that she took such a
hard stance of like, hey, hey, hey, don't misunderstand my words,
like I'm Judy effing Bloom exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
That was pretty much what's between the lines there for sure. Yeah,
so let's see, you said that she lives in Key West.
Now you can go to books and books at the
studios of Key West and say hi, maybe buy something,
and then she's I mean, she's just basically been really
back in the spotlight in the last few years, even
though she's from what I understand, still on hiatus since
(39:45):
twenty fifteen from writing or at least publishing. But starting
in twenty twenty three, there were not just that movie
for Are You There Got It to Me? Margaret, which,
like you said, people have been waiting decades for. There's
a documentary that came out that year, Bloom Forever.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
It's great and yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
And then in twenty twenty four there was a biography,
The Genius of Judy, by rachelle Bergstein, that was kind
of like a scholarly exploration of how Bloom's work impacted kids.
And then there was another one. It was a authorized
and then unauthorized autobiography called Judy Bloom Colon a Life
(40:25):
that her friend Mark Oppenheimer published in March twenty twenty six,
and that she publicly removed her support from cut off
contact with Oppenheimer. Yea, and then didn't explain to the
public or Oppenheimer why.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Yeah. I don't know why.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
No, no one knows why she didn't tell me. Poured
over those books and have been like or that book
and have been like, maybe this is it? Is this it?
I don't know. Mark Oppenheimer's like, I have no idea.
She didn't explain it to me. There wasn't anything controversial
she like, but she read the first draft and that
was it.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Yeah, yeah, who knows, you know, I know what you mentioned.
She had those two divorces, but you'll be glad to
know that she found long lasting true love. Sometimes it
takes a couple of times to get it right. But
she met a guy named George Cooper in nineteen seventy
nine and they moved in together after their very first
date and got married eight years later in nineteen eighty seven.
(41:20):
And that is who helps her run that bookstore down
in Key Wes. So they're still together after all these years.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
That is super cute. Yeah, he's like a civil rights
law professor.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
I think, yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
What else you got?
Speaker 1 (41:36):
I got nothing else I don't either.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Hats off to Judy Bloom. Even if you don't agree
with her writing and what she writes about to kids,
you still got to admire bravery, courage.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
And if you want to know more about Judy Bloom,
doesn't really matter what aide you are, go read some
of her books. While you're doing that, And you know what,
you could do a lot worse than checking it out
at your local library to support its existence there true
and or could do both. Buy one from your local
independent bookseller.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Yeah, maybe from Judy Bloom herself, sure you're in Key West.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Or if you find a dude selling books out of
the trunk of his car that is as independent a
bookseller as you can find.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
I wonder if you bought one from Judy Bloom herself
in her own bookstore and you're like, oh my god,
will you please sign this, She's like, I don't sign
books on Judy writing Bloom.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Please leave.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Here's your receipt middle finger.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Let's see. Chuck just made himself laugh, which is wonderful.
That means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
That means he's awake. Bonjour, Josh and Chuck. My husband
and I finally had a chance to see you live
for the first time at Massey Hall in Toronto this June,
which in real time was just a couple of nights
ago for us, and it was the greatest show on Earth.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Yeah, we got a standing ovation.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yeah, it was really something. We are from a small
community about two hours and a half north of Toronto,
and we're definitely not city people, but we figured it's
worth it for Josh and Chuck. My husband's been a
huge fan and loyal listener for many years. I'll admit
that I had personally listen because it gave me something
to talk about with a guy who had eventually become
my husband. But it didn't take long before I genuinely
(43:16):
fell in love with the show myself, and because of that,
I've always associated both of you with the very beginning
of our relationship. Nice your show at Massey Hall far
exceeded our expectations. I just wanted to thank you for
giving us such a wonderful evening. Atmosphere was warm, relaxed,
genuinely fun. My husband was smiling from ear to ear
the entire time, and despite the anxiety that events like
this can sometimes bring, he was comfortable and able to
(43:39):
simply enjoy himself, and that alone meant more to me
than I can express. So thank you both for doing
what you do despite all the craziness in the world
right now. It brought me so much joy to see
a room full of people come together simply to laugh
and learn and enjoy a couple of hours together. I
think your Canadian listeners note just how kind and genuine
you both are, and we truly appreciate that you made
the trip to spend some time with us here in care.
(44:00):
We'd be lucky to have you back anytime, because you're
always welcome here. Thanks for such a memorable experience, warmly,
Kelsey and Andrew. Sweet.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Yeah, that is a world class email.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Huh maybe best ever.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
That's the kind of email that removes borders and just
turns us into one great, big North American continent. You know. Agreed, Well,
thanks a lot, Kelsey and Andrew. Thanks for coming to
see us, and thank you Kelsey for such a great email.
And if you want to try to top that, let's
see what you got. You can wrap it up, spank
it on the bottom, and send it off to stuff
(44:33):
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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