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.”
Sally was sickening?! It was all too much for Judy. The divorce, the awful new marriage, Los Alamos, her unhappy kids—and now a respected children’s book reviewer claimed that treasured memories from Judy’s own past were so repulsive that she almost lost her lunch. She couldn’t take any more. Overcome by emotion, Judy picked up her bulky IBM Selectric and walked outside to the edge of her yard. Breath heavy, she hovered the typewriter over the arroyo. What would it feel like to hurl it down? To watch the keys pop out in a cathartic crush of metal?
“I held it out to drop it and then I thought, ‘Are you crazy?’ ” Blume told an audience at the Arlington Public Library event in 2015. The review was awful but the notion of quitting writing was much worse.
“You’re gonna let one person stop you from doing what you love to do?” She turned around and walked back inside the house.
Chapter Fifteen Monogamy
“Oh Mother, dammit! Why did you bring me up to think that this was what I wanted?”
Instead of tossing her career into the abyss, Judy wrote a letter to Jean Mercier. She had her habit of writing curse words over reviews she didn’t like, but this was the first time she’d confronted another professional about a bad write-up. In April 1977, she penned a respectful note to Mercier, telling her she was entitled to her opinion of Starring Sally but couldn’t understand why she’d called the book “sickening.” What was it about the creative pre-teen’s inner life that turned her stomach?
Mercier wrote back right away. Apologetically, she confessed that she was a great fan of Blume’s, which made her experience of Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself all the more disappointing. She said she had read the book twice, hoping for a different impression the second time around. But alas—she thought Blume could do better, as she had many times already. As for the “sickening” comment, Mercier explained that she was referring to one scene in particular. Toward the end of the book, the Freedmans order Chinese food in Miami and find a cockroach in their chop suey.
Perhaps Judy was feeling vulnerable because she had already started work on a new novel; one that would expose her to criticism in an entirely different way. For one thing, it was her first project that was genuinely intended for adults. It also was unapologetically frank about sex and marriage, just like some of the highly controversial books that inspired her, by Erica Jong and Sue Kaufman. But in comparison to many of Blume’s books for children, this one wasn’t coming as easily. She had rented a small office in Los Alamos over a donut shop, and she had spent three months tinkering with the opening pages in order to get the main character’s voice pitch-perfect. In the meantime, she scarfed down way too many glazed donuts. Judy gave up the office and went back to writing from home.
She kept going with the manuscript, likely knowing that this new book would drive some people crazy. It starts off with a bang—a housewife oversleeps and wakes up to find a naked man in a motorcycle helmet pleasuring himself on her front lawn. She calls the police, who treat her like a bored mom who made up the whole thing for attention. After that, her life becomes even more outrageous. Something about that motorcycle-riding exhibitionist—who later returns for a repeat performance—sets off a chain of events in which his audience-of-one suddenly recognizes that she’s stagnating. She leaves the house and stirs things up. She’s sick of being a wifey, and tired of being good.
Wifey is Judy Blume’s Fear of Flying. Like Isadora, Sandy also hates planes, but she braves a flight early in the novel when the Pressmans head down to Sandy’s sister’s lavish new vacation property in Montego Bay. Her best friend, Lisbeth, gives Sandy advice about how to get over her phobia. Lisbeth “explained it as Sandy’s need to control her own destiny,” Blume writes. “If you were the pilot,” she said, “you wouldn’t be afraid. What you really ought to do is take flying lessons.”
