For decades, Judy Blume declined all requests to adapt her 1970 breakout novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for cinema. She wanted to wait until she could hand it to filmmakers who had encountered her book the way most of her readers do, as children on the cusp of adolescence and trying, like Margaret, to make sense of their changing bodies and determine their place in the world. The film is finally out in the UK next month. Blume promises that it’s even better than her book. More adaptations of her bestsellers are in the works: Disney Plus is adapting Superfudge and Netflix is working on Forever, the book Blume wrote in 1975 at the request of her teenage daughter, who wanted to read a story “where two nice kids fall in love and they do it and no one has to die”. On 21 April, Amazon released a documentary, Judy Blume Forever, that explores how a bored, suburban stay-at-home mother came to write books that would help generations of children navigate the uncertainty and everyday horrors of adolescence – and became a lightning rod in America’s culture wars.
Blume is now 85 and told the documentary makers that she has stopped writing so that she can spend her final years not behind a desk but “out in the world”. Once again, she’s everywhere. One reason for this resurgence is generational: adults who grew up with Blume want to pass on this love to their children. But it’s also political. The same things that made her books radical when they were written in the Seventies and Eighties – the frank and honest explorations of puberty and sexuality – are newly controversial in the US, where conservatives are once again imposing book bans and restricting sex education. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Blume’s home state of Florida, last year passed the “don’t say gay” bill, which bans schools from teaching about sexuality and gender identity. Hundreds of books have been banned in the state’s schools – but inside Books & Books in Key West, the bookshop Blume opened with her third husband, the retired law professor George Cooper, she has pasted a sticker that says: “I sell banned books.”
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