The novel is told from four different perspectives: Margo’s, Michelle’s, Margo’s friend B.B.’s, and that of B.B.’s twelve-year-old daughter Sara. B.B. (whose real name is Francine) is also a divorced forty-year-old who is newish to Boulder. She and Margo meet at work and hit it off. But their burgeoning friendship gets complicated when B.B.’s ex-husband, Andrew, sublets the house next door to Margo’s for three months. One balmy August night, he calls over the fence and invites himself over for a drink and a hot tub. The flirtation revs up.

Andrew, a journalist, is rakish and charming. He earnestly tells Margo that she “look[s] like the girl on the Sun-Maid raisin box.” For their first official date, Margo calls him and tells him she’s leaving for Apocalypse Now in a few minutes, and would he like to join her? He would. He brings two boxes of raisins to the theater and they eat them before holding hands. When Margo nods off because she doesn’t like the movie, she snuggles up to Andrew’s shoulder.

Margo has casually dated around since her divorce. Her ex wanted “a Stepford Wife… a plastic princess,” she explains, and she isn’t eager to get married again. But after turning forty, she resolved to find herself a “steady man.”

“No more affairs going nowhere,” she reminds herself early in her and Andrew’s courtship. “From now on she was only interested in men who wanted to settle down… He would have plenty of experience with women, her steady man, and with life, so that settling down with her would be a pleasant relief.”

When Andrew’s sublet is up just a few months after they’ve been dating, Margo invites him to move in. She knows it’s quick but as soon as the words are out of her mouth, she’s excited. “She tried to think reasonably, but she couldn’t,” she says. “She wanted to jump up and shout, Yes, move in with me but a mature adult did not react solely on an emotional level. A mature adult thought things through, considered both sides of the issue.” So Margo checks herself. “There would be a million complications,” she admits.

Good-naturedly, Andrew agrees, but they resolve to go on the adventure anyway. The complications are real, and they include B.B., Sara—who openly wants to Parent Trap her mom and dad—Stuart, and, topping the list, Michelle. Michelle is horrified that her mother is letting Andrew move in with them, and she isn’t shy about telling her so. Ten days after Andrew has officially become the new roommate, Margo throws a dinner party with a few friends. Everything is rolling along smoothly until a conversational lull, when Michelle seizes on the chance to chat up Andrew in front of the group. “Did you know when we first moved to town my mother joined Man-of-the-Month club?” she asks sarcastically, before rattling off the names of Margo’s former lovers.

Margo is mortified but Andrew takes it in stride. “Oh, those were just alternative selections, Michelle,” he jokes. “They don’t count.” Soon, we find out that Michelle is hazing Andrew as a way of protecting her family. “Michelle had set out to test Andrew as soon as he’d moved in, because it was better to find out now if he could take it, and if he couldn’t, to get rid of him quickly, before she got to know him and like him.” As she confesses to Stuart, Michelle is tired of riding her mother’s emotional roller coaster, sick of being ignored when Margo is happy and getting dragged down with her when she’s miserable. “I’m the one who has to suffer through it every time one of her love affairs fizzles,” Michelle tells her brother defensively, after he scolds her for being obnoxious at dinner. “Me… not you!”

We learn that Michelle is harboring quieter resentments, too, ones she doesn’t admit to Stuart. Michelle writes poems that she’d like to show to Margo but she talks herself out of it. “One day, Margo would be sorry,” Michelle says. “Sorry that she’d had a daughter and hadn’t bothered to get to know her.”

This sequence complements a handful of passages from another book, published sixteen years later by a different author: Randy Blume. After graduating from Wesleyan in 1983, Randy’s professional life took an unexpected turn. She fell in love with flying planes and set out to become a pilot. She worked in commercial aviation for years and in 1999, she wrote Crazy in the Cockpit, a comic novel about a young female pilot trying to break into the male-dominated world of air travel. The book was edited by Dick Jackson, who by then had sold Bradbury and had set up his own imprint elsewhere.

Kendra is Crazy in the Cockpit’s protagonist, the only child of a respected academic who chairs the sociology department at Princeton. Early on in the book, Kendra tells us that her mother, Rachel, was distressed when she learned Kendra had no intention of attending Princeton herself: “You’ve become so self-absorbed that you probably never even considered what my life would be like without you!” Rachel said at the time. Kendra’s college roommate, a psych major, has diagnosed their mother-daughter bond as “ ‘acutely neurotic’ and wanted to use it as a case study for one of her research papers.”

Rachel hates that Kendra wants to walk away from her journalism training and pursue flying. When Kendra arrives home for Thanksgiving break, she anticipates a thorough guilting from her mom. But that’s not what happens. “It turned out my mother wouldn’t have noticed if I’d flown an airplane through the living room,” Kendra says. “She was too busy with Norman, her new boyfriend, who I found comfortably ensconced in our town house.” (Is the name “Norman” an Easter egg reference to Wifey?)

Christmas break, at a rental house in Key West, brings more of the same. “My mother and Norman got up early every morning to bike, snorkel, or sail, and I sat by the pool with my books and Jennifer, Norman’s sullen twelve-year-old daughter, who was angry because she’d been dragged away from her friends in Phoenix to a place that didn’t even have a decent mall,” Kendra explains. Throughout the novel, Rachel functions as a mixture of annoying adversary, conscience, and comic relief. When Kendra gets a flying job in Guam, Rachel visits and brings her anxiety with her. “How could she have let me come to this intellectual and cultural wasteland,” Kendra says, aping her mother’s point of view, “this paved rock in the middle of the Pacific? What if, God forbid, I ever needed emergency surgery?” (Randy was clearly grateful for her real mother’s well-earned appreciation of the differences between fact and fiction, and dedicated her one and only book to Judy, “who always believed I would write—even when I was too busy flying.”)

In Crazy in the Cockpit, the mother-daughter plot is a high-strung counterpoint to the much bigger story of Kendra’s coming-of-age drama, played out against the clouds. But in Smart Women, the relationship between Margo and Michelle—not Margo and Andrew—provides the book’s emotional center. The novel takes some wacky turns, like when teenage Michelle starts dating an older guy who secretly used to sleep with Margo. Thorny, for sure, but the pair work things out. Smart Women’s last chapter sees Michelle heading off for a summertime trip to Israel with Stuart and their father. The family has found a cautious balance, and Michelle has surprised herself by developing a big-sisterly fondness for Sara.

In a clever bit of symbolism, Michelle, who has smoothed out a bit, asks Margo to take care of a cactus in her absence. “I gave you a lot of shit this year, didn’t I, Mother?” she asks. Margo doesn’t argue, and is touched when Michelle asks her for a goodbye kiss. Margo tells Michelle that she loves her. “I love you too,” Michelle says as they embrace. “You know something, Mother… for a while I had my doubts, but you’ve turned out okay.”

Her words please Margo immensely and after Michelle is gone, she cries heavy tears of relief, in recognition of all they’ve been through. The deep emotional release is akin to surrendering to something sublime in nature, like a perfect sunset, Margo tells us. “She felt a pouring out of motherly love, followed by an enormous sense of pride in herself and her children. She had made a lot of mistakes, but they had come through it together,” Margo thinks with satisfaction.

“Is there any relationship more complicated than mothers and daughters?” Blume asks rhetorically in the introduction to Smart Women. Any close-knit, strong-willed mother-daughter duo would recognize the truth, the heat, and the humor in this question. The feminist movement didn’t ease generational tension among these pairs—if anything, it made it worse at times. Divorce, dating, and consciousness-raising meant that mothers grew up clumsily in front of their daughters. Girls, born native to the language of freedom, watched their mothers stumble and didn’t understand why they couldn’t just soar. Moms wanted the world for their female children, but then resented the bigness of their dreams, their easy entitlement. Hopefully we’ll do it better, whispers every generation of parents. Hopefully next time we’ll get it right for our kids.

Chapter Twenty-Four Libraries

“It’s really scary being a librarian right now.”

There’s still work to do. The Equal Rights Amendment—which, along with Roe v. Wade, was supposed to be the crowning achievement of Second Wave feminism—still hasn’t passed. It went through Congress and the Senate, but then died at the state level in 1979 thanks to a swell of conservative activism led by Phyllis Schlafly. As any parent of an elementary school–aged child can attest, the breadwinner/homemaker model of marriage is still “super baked in” to our legal and school systems, Suzanne Kahn said, which means that, arguably, traditional gender roles are, too. Regardless of any political lip service, universal child care still sounds like a progressive pipe dream. The tide of right-wing support that got Reagan elected is once again overtaking local and state governments.

While book challenges certainly slowed down by the end of the 1980s, they continued through the 1990s, and in some extreme cases ruined peoples’ careers in the process. That’s what happened when Wisconsin guidance counselor Michael Dishnow took on his school principal, who wanted to ban Forever in the early nineties. As Dishnow tells it, the principal at Rib Lake High School, where he worked, saw a girl reading Forever in the hallway and snatched it out of her hand. “Of course, [he] opened it initially to the perfect page with the sexual intercourse, and confiscated the book,” Dishnow remembered.

Dishnow was married to the school librarian at the time, who had described Judy Blume to him as “the best of the best.” Dishnow, a mustached former Marine and a onetime school principal himself, thought it “just wasn’t right” that the principal “didn’t go through any process” when he decided to take the student’s book away from her and subsequently ban it from the school library. They argued over it, and Dishnow recalled that “at one point I made a statement to the effect, I used a curse word, I said something about the ‘damn principal’ and this ‘damn school’ or whatever.” (The judge’s ruling on the case quoted him as having referred to the “God damned administration” at a faculty meeting.)

The well-liked guidance counselor said he was a rare liberal in a conservative town, where the school’s less-is-more approach to sex ed struck him as naive, given “the realities I knew having been in the Marine Corps overseas, various places, especially when it came to sexual issues.” Dishnow wrote a column in the local newspaper, Medford’s Star News, where he mused about things that came across his desk as a guidance counselor—mostly uncontroversial topics, like college applications and job hunts. But after the principal “unilaterally” banned Forever, he used his “Counselor’s Corner” platform to sound off on the situation.

Dishnow said that was probably the last straw. “They fired me… for being insubordinate,” he alleged. He’d had a successful twenty-five-year career working as a school administrator in Alaska before moving to Wisconsin, and felt the blow to his reputation was unjustified. He sued the Rib Lake school district, arguing that he had been let go in retaliation for exercising his First Amendment rights. “I was a gadfly, no doubt about it,” Dishnow said, “[but] they’re not going to take my rights away from me, so I fought it.”

The case went on for three long years, during which Dishnow looked for another position but claims he was kneecapped by the very public details of his dismissal, and the fact that he couldn’t get a letter of recommendation from his former employer. A jury agreed, awarding him $400,000 in damages (that number was reduced to approximately $180,000 in subsequent appeals, according to Dishnow). Dishnow eventually took the one and only employment offer he received, in another small town in Wisconsin, where he still resides, at a significantly lower salary from the already modest one he was making at Rib Lake. “But I wasn’t in it for the money to begin with,” Dishnow said. “Nobody else would touch me at that point. It was a long time ago but it was a pretty trying experience.”

He is still in contact with some former colleagues at Rib Lake High School and they told him that to this day, Forever remains on a restricted shelf in the library. Dishnow’s campaign seems to have done nothing to change the principal’s mind about the book, but he did get one high-profile shoutout for his efforts. In Places I Never Meant to Be, Blume mentions Dishnow among a number of examples of people who stood up to book bans and experienced dire personal and professional consequences. “Guidance counselor Mike Dishnow was fired for writing critically of the board of education’s decision to ban my book Forever,” she notes. “Ultimately, he won a court settlement, but by then his life had been turned upside down.”

For a while, it looked like the culture wars over children’s books had been diffused. Two blockbuster series took over bookstores in the mid-1980s: The Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High. Ann M. Martin, who created the Connecticut band of business-minded babysitters, had them talk about serious issues—diabetes, divorce and remarriage, cultural differences, death—but left the puberty stuff to Blume. Sweet Valley High, about a pair of pretty blond twins, was straight fluff. Fleissner said her mother hated those books, which crowded out complex novels like hers: “From my mom’s point of view and the other seventies-era writers, it was such a step backwards, to this much more 1950s sanitized version of like, ‘Oh, who’s dating who?’ Little high school dramas.”

Parents and politicians argued over Satanism, rap lyrics, Beavis and Butt-Head, and whether or not it was cool that Britney Spears dressed like a sexy schoolgirl. But now, book challenges are back—and they’re more cutthroat than ever.

In April 2023, Blume told the BBC that the current movement to ban books is “so much worse than it was in the ’80s,” because instead of being stoked by grassroots movements, it’s driven by the politicians themselves. She cited her adopted home state of Florida as a place where “bad politicians who [are] drunk with power, who want to get out there” are using extreme talking points and legislation to do so. “It is so frightening,” Blume told British journalist Laura Kuenssberg. “I think the only answer is for us to speak out and really keep speaking out, or we’re going to lose our way.”

Arlene LaVerde, who has spent three decades working for the New York City Department of Education, said that Blume’s novels aren’t challenged nearly as often now, in part because they aren’t as ubiquitous as they were in the 1980s, and also because the bull’s-eye of conservative grievance has moved. Now the young adult books that are most often under attack are ones with LGBTQ+ themes. Of the top thirteen most banned books in 2022 according to the American Library Association’s list, seven contain LGBTQ+ subjects and/or characters, including Gender Queer, All Boys Aren’t Blue, the award-winning graphic novel Flamer by Mike Curato, and transgender writer Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay.

LaVerde said that thanks to the brouhaha over Critical Race Theory, books that speak openly about race—even straightforward history books—are under fire, too. “Critical Race Theory is not taught in K–12 education,” insisted LaVerde. “But it’s a term that people grab on to and use because they feel like it’s indoctrination. Indoctrinating what? Indoctrinating that in the United States, more than half of the country had slaves? And that it was legal?” She went on: “It’s a shameful part of our history, yeah. But it’s a part of our history and we should learn about it.”

In New York City, a book would never get removed from a school library if just one parent or educator complained about it, LaVerde explained. A complaint initiates a formal process, wherein the first step is requesting that the challenger read the book from cover to cover (many parents who balk at certain titles do so because “they looked over a kid’s shoulder and, excuse my language, they saw the word ‘fuck.’ Or they saw the word ‘sex,’ ” she said). If they’re still unhappy after that, they can fill out a challenge form, which then prompts the school to put together a committee of readers, consisting of a school administrator, a representative from the DOE’s library system, and the librarian. If it’s a high school, some students will be invited to sit on the committee as well. The group then meets to discuss the book, its merits, and whether it actually belongs in the building. If the committee votes in favor of retaining the title, it cannot be challenged for another two years.

With such a robust system in place, few books end up getting removed—but librarians still absorb strong feelings from parents when they disagree with the reading material that’s been selected for their children. At the time we spoke, Lauren Harrison had worked as an elementary school librarian at a public school in the West Village for seven years. She said she stocked her shelves with the popular titles of the moment—all the Dog Man books, The Baby-sitters Club updated graphic novels—as well as inclusive picture books for early readers, like My Own Way: Celebrating Gender Freedom for Kids; Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race; and Antiracist Baby. Given the demographics of the families who attend her school, Harrison said she was surprised when she received feedback from a mom that her book selections were “too gay.” She recalled getting an angry email after reading the picture book Our Subway Baby—based on author Peter Mercurio’s real-life experience of finding an abandoned baby on the New York City subway and ultimately adopting him with his husband—aloud to the students. Harrison dismissed the email as “ridiculous,” with her principal’s blessing. “I loved that book, the kids loved it, they fought over who got to borrow it,” she said. “It’s offensive to me that that book’s offensive to you.”

Harrison’s mother, Carol Waxman, is also a librarian and has worked in the Connecticut public library system for almost forty years. She had a harrowing experience after she helped plan West Hartford’s first drag queen story time in the summer of 2022.

Waxman was enthusiastic about hosting the event as part of a larger local Pride celebration, especially given the town’s “very active Pride community.” But as soon as the story time was scheduled, the blowback started. “Well, it ended up being so controversial and difficult. Letters, phone calls, people came in to see me, furious,” Waxman remembered. She was shaken up by it, “because some of the letters to me were threatening. ‘This is on you, your career is at stake, you’re gonna throw everything away because of this,’ ” people were telling her. The town’s mayor and manager also received rage-filled correspondences, all from older citizens who stressed that they’d never, ever let their grandchildren attend an event hosted by drag queens. Reluctantly, officials made the decision to move the reading outside, in light of the threats of violence and vandalism against the library. And when it became clear that the event might need a rain plan, a nearby Barnes & Noble stepped up and offered to absorb it. “I went over to see it and it was packed,” Waxman said.

She noted—as Blume has, too—that this moment’s increased appetite for censorship isn’t coming exclusively from the Right. Blume experienced this firsthand in April 2023 after expressing solidarity with J.K. Rowling, who has borne the brunt of major social media pile-ons due to her outspoken anti-trans views. Public response was so negative that Judy issued an aggrieved statement on X (then Twitter) clarifying that “I wholly support the trans community. My point, which was taken out of context, is that I can empathize with a writer—or person—who has been harassed online.”

Then there were the sanitized versions of Roald Dahl’s books that struck up a frenzy in the winter of 2023. That February, UK conservative broadsheet the Telegraph reported that “Augustus Gloop is no longer fat, Mrs. Twit is no longer fearfully ugly, and the Oompa Loompas have gone gender-neutral in new editions of Roald Dahl’s beloved stories.” Dahl’s publisher, with the blessing of the Dahl estate, had scrubbed potentially offensive descriptions and passages from his famous books, presumably to appease today’s more sensitive readers, with Gloop going from “enormously fat” to just “enormous,” and the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach becoming Cloud-People, for instance. But the response was mixed at best; PEN America criticized the move, and oft-censored author Salman Rushdie tweeted that Puffin Books and Dahl’s descendants “should be ashamed.” Puffin later announced that it would continue to publish “classic” versions of Dahl’s novels, giving contemporary readers a choice between the two.

Waxman said that she keeps her collection up to date, which at times means retiring titles that no longer fit in with cultural norms. She said any children’s books that depict guns—which used to be unremarkable—are now “taboo, completely taboo” in the age of mass shootings. Same goes for illustrations that show adults smoking cigarettes. Waxman also mentioned Lois Lenski, an author and illustrator who published award-winning children’s books in the 1930s and 1940s. Waxman would “never” recommend them for young readers today, she said, because of their outmoded depictions of gender roles within families. “The mother is always home, never works, always wearing a dress, always home cleaning the house,” Waxman said. “I’m very aware of those books now, not that anybody is going to tell me to ban them, but they’re just not in good taste.” (People have compared this process, called “weeding” in the library biz, to banning books but it’s a false equivalency. Weeding is about unshelving titles that have been rendered irrelevant by the culture. Banning is about cutting off access to books that are contributing to current cultural conversations in the hopes that these conversations will stop.)

“It’s really scary being a librarian right now,” LaVerde confessed, given high levels of polarization and the aggression with which citizens express and defend their personal views. “It’s really scary being an educator,” she went on, “which is weird, because it’s something I would never in my entire career of thirty-plus years think I would say.” LaVerde conceded that “honestly, in New York, we’re luckier. But I think about my colleagues in Florida, in Texas, who are being threatened, not only to lose their certification, their license, their pensions, their careers, but they’re being threatened with bodily harm.” Politics, religion, and the concurrent racial justice and transgender rights movements have all crashed together in a shockingly painful collision over… books, of all things. But LaVerde thinks stories for kids are so contentious not only because they tend our children’s nascent moral fibers but also because they uproot our deepest fears as parents—that in being exposed to increasingly mature topics, our kids will become independent and leave us to lead their own lives.

“Parents don’t want to admit that their children are growing up,” she said. “It hurts.”

Nevertheless, she’s strongly opposed to book bans and believes that reading about our differences—whether they’re cultural, racial, or involving sexual orientation—actually builds empathy by reminding us that we all share the same human experiences. “Your struggles are a little bit different [than a character’s] but you know what? The kid in rural Mississippi is fighting with his mom to go to a sleepover, and me in New York City, I’m fighting with my mom, she’s not letting me go to a sleepover, either,” LaVerde said, channeling a young reader’s point of view.

School librarian Julia Loving said that she makes a priority of reminding her students that access to a wide range of books is a privilege, even in the age of social media, where kids often tell her that reading takes too long and is “boring.”

Loving recently responded to this sentiment by sharing her own history with them—about her parents, who migrated to New York City from the Jim Crow South because they wanted their children to have better opportunities than they had. About her great-great-grandparents, who Loving found out could read and write when she dug into her genealogical roots. That surprised her. She told her upper schoolers that literacy was rare among Black people in Virginia in the late nineteenth century. She asked the students if they had any idea why that might be.

“They said, ‘Well, they couldn’t read or write because maybe many of them had been enslaved, right? Because that was something that was illegal to do, educate enslaved people,’ ” Loving recalled someone saying. “And so I asked them, ‘Out of all things in the world, why would someone want another human being not to know how to actually read and write?’ And one of the kids said, ‘Well, you keep them from power, you strip them of their power.’ ”

Knowledge is power, reading is power, and for the first time since the 1980s, today’s kids are caught up in a multidirectional adult power-play over the kinds of books they should be allowed to slip into their backpacks and quietly enjoy in their bedrooms. Loving said her personal share made a visible impact. “I always say, the reason [to have] inclusivity and diversity in our collections, and definitely having our kids have access to books, is because of the power that can be gained from them,” Loving explained. “They can take you places that you’ve never been, can teach you how to do this or that… in those scenarios, why would you not want to read? Because you have to realize that there’s something to this reading thing.”

Chapter Twenty-Five Legacy

“We didn’t have the internet; we didn’t have any places where we could find the answers.”

In the 1981 Christian Science Monitor article, there’s a quote about Blume that feels kind of ridiculous now. It came from Mary Burns, then a professor of children’s literature at Framingham State College in Massachusetts. Burns told the reporter that “in every age… there are books that answer the needs of the moment, and Judy Blume’s books seem to be fulfilling that need. But you can’t equate popularity with quality, nor quality with popularity. The question that needs to be asked now is: will Judy Blume’s books be as popular 20 years from now?”

Okay, it sounds silly in hindsight, especially given the flash flood of love and gratitude that has washed over Blume these past few years. But Burns wasn’t entirely off base. Kids aren’t reaching for Blume’s novels as frequently as they were in the 1980s and 1990s. Julia Loving noted that while she keeps all the Judy Blume books in her library, they don’t circulate nearly as much as they used to. Carol Waxman agreed. These days, she said, it’s mostly parents of young children who are checking out Blume’s books, wanting to share beloved characters like Fudge and Margaret and Deenie with the next generation. Less often, it’s the kids themselves who are plucking them off the shelves. They’re reaching instead for graphic novels and Captain Underpants.

But whether Blume’s work stands the test of time is an entirely different conversation. You only need to spend a few hours reading Superfudge with a second grader to appreciate the perennial appeal of her writing. “Bonjour, stupid!” still unleashes a tiny bellyful of giggles. Also, the challenges kids face remain largely unchanged. Parents are still getting divorced. Elementary schoolers still get diagnosed with scoliosis and require intervention. Bullies terrorize their classmates; best friends laugh and sob and struggle. The competitive friendship dynamics between Margaret and Nancy remain true to life, with or without the intrusion of iPads and cell phones.

And we, the pre-internet generation, genuinely needed Judy Blume. She was dropping nuggets of truth and wisdom that kids couldn’t get anywhere else at the time. Yes, if we were lucky, we had some sex ed in school, and yes, a fifth grader could steal her parents’ copy of The Joy of Sex and smuggle it into a birthday party the way a classmate of mine did in 1992 (she was caught and everyone got reprimanded and sent home). But it wasn’t the same. “The way that sex education is usually done is to put up one picture of a female body and one picture of a male body, which already scientifically is not enough,” Cory Silverberg said of the heteronormative approach to sex ed that dominated the twentieth century. That’s something, but it’s not gender- or orientation-inclusive and it’s not meeting children at their level.