“People Learned More About Sex From Judy Blume Than They Did From Sex Ed.”

Rachelle Bergstein on Judy Blume’s legacy.

Rachelle Bergstein opens The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us with an assertion that Judy Blume has never been more famous than she is today. The youths are discovering her on BookTok, she was the subject of a popular Amazon Prime documentary Judy Blume Forever, and her most famous book, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was finally adapted into a movie starring Rachel McAdams last year, more than 50 years after it was published. Issues that Blume touches on or was embroiled in at the time, from sex education to book banning, are eerily relevant today and come up in my discussion with Bergstein. Blume’s ultimate endurance speaks to the titular genius of the author, which Bergstein wants to keep as a surprise for readers of her book, out today.

So you open this book with the assertion that Judy Blume is more famous than she’s ever been, so most of my questions will be related to Judy’s place in culture today. I wanted to start by asking you about her newfound popularity on BookTok. What do you think it is about Judy Blume that makes her enduring and relevant today?

That was my whole mission in writing this book. There was the selfish aspect of wanting to spend time with Judy Blume books, but the animating force of it was to understand why her books have held up for so long and why people are still talking about them when many of her contemporaries have receded into history. There are a lot of different things that go into it. One of them is the fact that she wrote about things that nobody else was writing about at the time for children. She wrote about bodies, she wrote about puberty, she wrote about menstruation, she wrote about masturbation. Eventually she wrote about loss of virginity and teen sex and how sex might impact first love. I believe one of the reasons that Judy is so important to readers is because she parented them in a lot of ways. They look back and think wow, I learned so much from Judy Blume. I had people tell me when I was interviewing them for this book that they learned more about sex from Judy Blume than they did from their sex ed classes in school. 

But that’s not the whole story