Judy wasn’t happy in her marriage. At low moments, she wondered if it had been doomed from the start. Five weeks before her and John’s wedding, her beloved father, her Doey-Bird, had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-four. She was holding his hand when he lost consciousness. Judy was still crumbling under her grief when she walked down the aisle.

Sixteen years later, and just three years after the Blumes bought a bigger house with a swimming pool, Judy asked John for a divorce in the spring of 1975. He agreed, but then they decided to live together until June so that Randy, then fourteen, and Larry, then twelve, could finish out the school year before moving. After that, the kids headed off to sleepaway camp and Judy packed up their lives and moved to a townhouse an hour away, in Princeton.

She was thirty-seven years old and alone, she realized, for the first time in her life.

The kids hadn’t taken the separation well. Before Judy and John told them, Judy had consulted a family counselor who warned her that the children would have questions—and she needed to come prepared with answers. Unlike other kinds of unhappy couples, the Blumes weren’t demonstrative in their moments of friction. They weren’t big yellers or fighters. As far as young Randy and Larry were concerned, their polite, upstanding parents were perfectly content. “It was a nice marriage,” Blume later said, “but inside I was dying.”

To explain herself, Judy wrote letters to the kids before they left for the summer, which they read alone in their rooms and then came together to sob. When home feels safe, divorce can be catastrophic to the children. Judy knew that all too well, having put herself in Karen’s shoes to write It’s Not the End of the World. Despite the book’s sunny title and its optimistic ending, Judy recognized the pain that it took to get there.

Still, she felt she had no other choice. A few years before she initiated the split, Judy felt herself, at the age of thirty-five, undergoing a massive change—one that she’d eventually describe as an adolescent rebellion, just delayed by twenty years. Essie, who she spoke to twice a day, became representative of Judy’s subtle, lifelong indoctrination into a role—the self-annihilating housewife—that no longer suited her. That perspective transformed John in her eyes from a good-enough spouse and a solid provider to a figurehead of her mother’s middle-class values. Judy was sick of it all: the PTA meetings, the dinners at the club, the aqua-lined pool in the backyard. Suddenly, she felt an overwhelming urge “to taste and experience life,” she said in Presenting Judy Blume. “I wasn’t terrible. I was responsible. I was working. I loved the kids. But I was rebelling… My divorce was all part of that rebellion.”

Judy recognized a level of childishness in herself, which she came by honestly, having gone straight from her parents’ house to her husband’s. She felt immature in ways she didn’t like, and realized that John treated her in kind, like something delicate and unformed. Before the divorce, Judy had understood—with a level of dread—that she wanted desperately to take shape. She wished to be a person with edges and depth and firm, well-defined corners, just like one of her characters.

John blamed Fear of Flying. Erica Jong’s unrestrained roman à clef, about marriage and a successful female writer’s messy interior life, came out in 1973, before the Blumes separated. Isadora White Wing is a twice-wed Jewish poet from New York who, five years into her second marriage to psychoanalyst Bennett Wing, finds herself desperate for adventure and sexual novelty. She still loves Bennett but can’t deny the sense of yearning that has cast a shadow over her daily life with him. “What was marriage anyway?” Wing wonders early in the novel. “Even if you loved your husband, there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge, no danger.”

“Fear of Flying was a very, very important book to me,” Blume told Bust magazine in 1997. “I was becoming aware. My husband blamed it for my unhappiness—which is simplistic, to say the least.” Over the course of Jong’s novel, Wing comes to understand that her quest for passion—and the infamous “zipless fuck”—is part of a larger identity crisis about being an artist, a wife, and potentially a mother (she’s grappling with the decision of whether or not to have kids). “Was I going to be just a housewife who wrote in her spare time?” Wing asks herself at a crossroads between her husband and another man. “Was I going to keep passing up the adventures that were offered to me? Or was I going to make my fantasies and my life merge if only for once?”

Wing chooses the latter, running off with Adrian Goodlove, another analyst who is the crude and domineering funhouse image of her rigid and respectful husband. The book’s title refers to Wing’s very real phobia—she’s terrified of air travel—but also the nagging suspicion that she’s always holding herself back. When she leaves with Adrian for a road trip across Europe, she feels, at least at first, like she’s finally taken flight. But as time wears on, Adrian’s shortcomings start to surface. He’s mostly impotent, for one thing. He’s also full of crap. When he leaves her without warning to go back to his wife and children, Wing finds herself alone in a hotel room in Paris, wide awake through a bout of insomnia and raking herself over the coals. What had she done to her life? “Leaving Bennett was my first really independent action,” she resolves as the night wears on. It was the first thing she’d ever done that directly defied her parental and cultural programming.

By morning she understands that she’s always been afraid of growing up. “I was afraid of being a woman,” she says. “Afraid of all of the nonsense that went with it. Like being told that if I had babies, I’d never be an artist, like my mother’s bitterness, like my grandmother’s boring concentration on eating and excreting, like being asked by some dough-faced boy if I planned to be a secretary. A secretary!” In the end, she goes back to Bennett. After all, he’s kind, smart, and good in bed, and it isn’t his fault that the world makes it nearly impossible for women to be on their own. Isadora can only hope that he’ll live up to his surname and help her soar.

Fear of Flying spoke to Judy, as did another feminist novel published in 1967, called Diary of a Mad Housewife. That book, by Upper East Sider and Vassar graduate Sue Kaufman, follows New York City mother of two Bettina Balser in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Balser, thirty-six, is a Smith College–educated former artist who can quote Baudelaire and Proust, but whose life now revolves around shopping, decorating, cooking, and throwing parties. It’s all at the behest of her husband, Jonathan, a former activist turned nouveau riche social climber who demands that his wife head up their home life to his exacting standards. With no outlet to express her anger, Balser—who shakes uncontrollably when Jonathan issues his unreasonable orders—takes to drinking, smoking too much, and writing in a secret journal. She also starts having an affair with a piggish playwright named George Prager. He isn’t very nice, but the pair share an explosive sexual connection.

Prager is dominant in bed, and Balser finds that she likes it. For a while, that uncomfortable truth scares her. But then she begins to understand that what she’s acting out with her lover is just another angle on her relationship with Jonathan. “Why should I be disturbed by the sado-masochistic aspects of that relationship, when I have another one going?” Balser writes in her diary. “Why not face the truth: it’s an enormous relief to have that sort of thing out in the open and act it out, instead of having to deal with it in a disguised form, all veiled and gussied up with domestic overlay as it is with Jonathan and me.”

Although Balser can’t stand who her husband has become, she understands she’s trapped—after all, he controls the money. At one point, her period is late and she believes Prager has gotten her pregnant. Her options, or lack thereof, flash before her. “Without a cent of my own, without a checking account, the only other way [ beyond asking Prager for cash] I could have paid for an abortion would have been to try and get the money secretly from my father, and even I shied away from all the filthy implications of that,” she realizes. Luckily, her period shows up and she doesn’t have to debase herself. But even that relief doesn’t solve the problem of the larger social constructs that frame her marriage, in which she has to be the “submissive woman,” the “obedient wife” to the “forceful dominant male” breadwinner.

Blume nods to Diary of a Mad Housewife in Wifey, when Sandy’s sophisticated best friend, Lisbeth—who lives on the Upper West Side and who is experimenting with an open marriage—slips her a copy. Sandy wonders if she should be offended: “Did Lisbeth think she was a mad housewife too? Was that why she’d given her the book?” The novel doesn’t come up again until Sandy’s husband, Norman, mentions it during a fight, when Sandy is trying to express why their relationship leaves her unsatisfied.

“Have you been reading that book again?” Norman snipes.

“What book?”

“The one Lisbeth gave you.”

“This has nothing to do with Lisbeth or books,” Sandy says.

Like Bettina Balser, Sandy feels she has to choke her own voice down in order to stomach her marriage. Like Isadora White Wing, Sandy worries that she’ll never know true sexual liberation firsthand. Did Judy relate to these predicaments, too? And if so, what did she do about it?

Blume is forthright about one part of her “rebellion,” which overlapped with Isadora Wing’s—her marriage to John left her feeling inept. “He had married this little girl, and he was happy that way,” Blume told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune in 1985. Divorcing him meant she would have to grow up, which wasn’t easy, either. John was cold toward her; the kids were angry. Judy found that the period after her divorce left her more confused and depressed than ever.

“Just getting through the day was a real struggle for me,” she writes of that time in Letters to Judy. “I woke up crying every morning and I went to bed crying every night. I wasn’t sure I could cope. I had very little left over for my kids.”

She worried a lot, fearing that she’d ruined all their lives. The only thing she didn’t have to stress about was money. Thanks to her career, she wasn’t financially ensnared like Bettina Balser. She wouldn’t have to work as a cocktail waitress—“That’s what divorced women on TV always turn out to be—cocktail waitresses,” Karen muses in It’s Not the End of the World—or transform herself into the sad woman Sandy’s sister, Myra, describes in Wifey.

Myra is having a turbulent moment with her wealthy gynecologist husband, Gordon. She doesn’t trust him anymore, but she can’t imagine leaving, either. “If I divorced him, I’d have to give up the house and move to an apartment in Fort Lee, with all the other divorcées,” she whines. She’d have to “eat at Howard Johnson’s instead of Périgord Park, get a job in a department store.” For Myra, who has embraced the upscale suburban lifestyle in ways Sandy cannot bring herself to do, it’s a nonstarter. She’ll have to look past his suspected dalliances (it’s only one, with Sandy incidentally) and stand by him.

Judy didn’t have to brave financial ruin to leave John, and so the exes settled into their new routines as co-parents. She had the kids during the school week, in Princeton, and on the weekend they went to John’s, where he would take them out to fancy dinners and plays in the city. “He entertained them lavishly,” Judy later explained, “not to compete with me, but because he didn’t know what else to do. He wanted to show them that he cared.”

This went on for a bit, until John realized that he couldn’t sustain paying for expensive outings every time he had his children with him. The big-ticket jaunts abruptly stopped, which disappointed them. It took a while, Blume has said, for the family to find its rhythm within their joint custody arrangement. And then, another change upended their shaky balance.

Chapter Fourteen Mistakes

“From the beginning, we fought.”

Judy had gotten involved with someone, a man named Tom Kitchens. He appeared to be John Blume’s total opposite—a native Texan, a Christian, an academic, with deep brown eyes, a goatee-style beard, and a headful of curls. They’d met before the divorce was finalized, when Judy took the kids on a cross-country flight to accept an award for Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Kitchens sat across from Judy and they struck up a conversation.

He came off as youthful and carefree. “My son and daughter thought he was a kid,” Blume told People magazine in 1978. “He thought I was their big sister, and I thought he was a ski bum.” Instead, Tom told her, he was a physicist at the National Science Foundation who traveled the country bestowing government grants on innovative labs, like “a 12-month-a-year Santa Claus,” he said with a twinkle. At forty, he was a bit older than Judy and was five years out of a marriage that had yielded three daughters. At the end of the trip, they exchanged contact information. After his next flight, Tom sent her a postcard saying that he’d sat in the same seat, and the ride had been a lot less fun.

As Judy moved out of the family’s house in New Jersey, she and Tom became pen pals. He was based at the time in Washington, DC, and she sent him one of her books to read. After she officially became single, she invited him up to attend a party. Tom was compelling to Judy, in part because he lived a life that seemed so different from the one she had known. He’d traveled widely. This was not a guy who needed to tee off every Sunday morning—he was curious and outdoorsy, with a sense of adventure. Suburban life had felt like a trap to Judy. Suddenly, Tom Kitchens appeared, offering what looked like a handsome escape hatch.

When Tom was assigned to a short-term position in London, he invited Judy and the kids to come with him. This—this was the kind of person Judy aspired to be. A woman whose radius extended well beyond her small town’s outer limits. A globe-trotter. A sophisticate who could give her children the experience of six months in Europe.

She said yes—she, Randy, and Larry would go with him. In the winter of early 1976, they left the townhouse in Princeton for their new, temporary home in North West London. She and Tom got married that spring, less than a year after her divorce from John. It was fast, but for the first time, Judy was letting herself go wherever the universe took her. Was it crazy that she had started seeing someone so quickly?

In retrospect, maybe a little bit. She certainly didn’t have to commit herself so wholeheartedly, so officially, to the very first man she dated, she later realized. “I could have had affairs, but instead I got married because that’s what I thought you did,” she explained after the fact. “So I married the first man who said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ ”

They’d moved in together without really knowing each other, and Judy had an inkling that things weren’t working out even before she and Tom tied the knot. For instance—he’d been impressed by her career at first, but quickly grew resentful of all the time, between writing and book promotion, it took for her to maintain it. Instead of falling head over heels for the new guy in their mother’s life, Randy and Larry were ambivalent toward Tom.

“I would say, ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ ” Blume wrote in Letters to Judy. “And my kids would just look at me as if I were crazy. They didn’t dislike him. But they didn’t think he was so great either.”

Larry was having a particularly hard time, acting out because he was angry about the divorce but refusing to admit it. Yet Judy felt she had no choice but to marry Tom. She had already uprooted her children by moving them to London, and making the relationship official seemed like the only way to ground that livewire decision. The idea of going back to Princeton—without Tom—was mortifying. The day they went to sign their marriage license in Hampstead, Judy had an allergy attack. “It was very hard for me to get married again,” she told People about reciting her vows with red eyes, runny nose, and a puffy face. “I walked around the block three times: I was scared of the connotation of being somebody’s wife again.”

She liked London, but after Tom’s tenure there ended he took a job as a researcher at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL), where in the 1940s Robert Oppenheimer headed up work on the first atomic bomb. Oppenheimer had handpicked Los Alamos, New Mexico, for its off-the-beaten-path location, and after World War II, the facility—which was eventually renamed the Los Alamos National Laboratory—remained devoted to weapons development, among other national security projects. For Judy, Los Alamos felt considerably more foreign than London. The insular community revolved almost entirely around the lab. Looking at the mountainous canyon landscape, she might as well have been on the moon.

The family struggled in Los Alamos. Judy wasn’t thrilled with the schools, and Randy hated it there almost immediately. She grew increasingly hostile, transforming from a shy, artistic, responsible adolescent into a full-blown angry teenager. One day, she didn’t come home when she said she was going to. As the hours passed, Judy grew more and more anxious, until she did something she swore she never would do as a parent and reached for Randy’s diary. “In spite of my vow to respect her privacy, I finally opened it and read the last few entries,” Blume writes in Letters to Judy. “It was clear she was feeling alienated, frightened and confused and that we needed help.”

Judy couldn’t really blame her; she didn’t like Los Alamos, either. The area was teeming with ambitious husbands but it was almost impossible to find any equally fulfilled wives. “It is a town with very frustrated, resentful, talented women who have very few outlets and few job opportunities,” Blume said later.

In her 1981 novel Tiger Eyes, which mostly takes place in Los Alamos, Blume depicts it as an odd little world filled with narrow-minded white people who carry guns for no reason and look down their noses on minorities. Davey Wexler, the book’s fifteen-year-old protagonist, clashes with her aunt and uncle who live there and have taken her and her family in. Uncle Walter is a pedantic, neurotic type who works for LASL and imposes rules on Davey that she resents. “You’re the one who’s making the bombs,” she yells at him after he warns her that learning to drive is too dangerous. “You’re the one who is figuring out how to blow up the whole world. But you won’t let me take Driver’s Ed.”

Judy was lonely there, and not just because she had trouble making friends. Her marriage to Tom was falling apart. They’d hardly known each other when they moved in together, and despite the initial attraction, they had very little in common. She’d gotten married to save face, to protect her kids from any harmful gossip—a divorcée living with a man out of wedlock was enough to spin the rumor mill in the 1970s—and of course, to satisfy her mother. But in the process, she’d once again managed to sacrifice her own happiness. Tom, whose kids were older, didn’t approve of her parenting and competed with Randy and Larry for her attention. Judy had two abortions during that time, to avoid the prospect of the pair of them raising a baby together. Their home wasn’t peaceful. “From the beginning, we fought,” Blume said. “We fought, I think, because we didn’t take the time to get to know each other. Each of us had invented the person of our dreams and then we were disappointed when we turned out not to be.”

So Judy leaned into her professional life: The Career, as she called it. In many ways, it was the only thing keeping her sane. In 1977, she published Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, a highly autobiographical novel about an imaginative Jewish girl growing up in the post–World War II era. It’s 1947 and Sally lives with her family in Elizabeth, New Jersey: her kindly dentist father, her reserved mother, and her brilliant yet troubled older brother, Douglas, whose stubborn case of nephritis prompts a temporary move down to Miami Beach, Florida, for the winter. Her dad—Doey-Bird—stays up north to work, so her mom taps Ma Fanny, Sally’s grandmother, to go with them. Sally puts on a brave face for her parents, but she’s a fundamentally anxious kid whose thoughts are always roiling about the war. She wonders if Hitler is still alive and is posing as her mustached neighbor, Mr. Zavodsky. She writes Zavodsky letters that she never sends: “I think I know who you are. I think you are a person people hate. I think you are a person who is wicked and evil.”

Sally is also making sense of another kind of injustice—her very first experience of the Jim Crow South. To save money, the family takes the train from New Jersey down to Florida, and Sally is secretly relieved because she’s afraid to fly. On the train they’re seated across from a Black woman, who introduces herself as Mrs. Williamson, and her three young children, including an eight-month-old baby named Loreen. One morning, Sally wakes up and they’re gone, which is strange because they’re also going all the way to Miami Beach. She asks her mother where they went. “They had to change cars,” her mom explains. “We’re in a different part of the country now Sally… and colored people don’t ride with white people here.”

Sally is appalled, even more so because her mother doesn’t seem all that upset about it. A few months later, she’s hanging out in town with her new friend Andrea when the girls stop for water. As Sally is drinking from the fountain, a stranger comes and grabs at her, mid-sip. The woman gestures frantically to the label on the fountain: Colored. “What would your mothers say if they knew what you’d been doing?” she scolds them, handing Sally a tissue to wipe her mouth. “God only knows what you might pick up drinking from this fountain… you better thank your lucky stars I came along when I did.”

Andrea is another Northern transplant and the two girls are stunned. Walking home, they talk through the experience. “Did you know they had two fountains?” Sally asks. Andrea says she didn’t. They go on to discuss how in Florida, people with dark skin need to ride in the back of the bus.

“My mother says you have to follow the rules,” Andrea says.

“So does mine,” Sally confirms, before telling her that back in New Jersey, she and the family’s housekeeper, Precious Redwine, were fine using all the same cups and dishes.

You can feel the gears turning in Sally’s head: Is segregation all that different from what happened to the Jews in Europe? Unfortunately for Judy, most reviewers weren’t moved by Sally’s story. “While Ms. Blume’s book is teeming with social value, its literary qualities are less conspicuous,” the New York Times wrote. “Her characters are so recognizable that they don’t matter.” Reviewer Julia Whedon treated Blume’s popularity with subtly snobbish curiosity: “It’s evident that her appeal goes beyond sexual frankness,” Whedon wrote. “She must be conveying a certain emotional reality that children recognize as true.”

This—the idea that Judy had endeared herself to young fans by indulging their immature tastes, instead of feeding them what they needed—had been following Blume for a while. Mostly, it didn’t bother her; she didn’t see herself as a member of the literati, either. But she also felt protective of Sally. After all, it was the closest she’d come in fiction to sharing the facts of her own childhood (like so much of the book, the incident on the train really happened to her). And so when reviewer Jean Mercier panned the novel in Publishers Weekly, Judy was devastated. The write-up felt extreme and mean-spirited. “Blume’s approach will be resented as frivolous by many readers, since Sally’s own relatives are victims of the Nazi death camps, not the stuff of humor,” Mercier wrote. “Neither are some of the other details in the book. In fact, parts are sickening.”